Sunday, July 19, 2020
By:
[All views are my own.]
Hope everyone is doing well!
This week, I kept working on my data analysis coding. We realized that this whole project of correlating weather variables will take a lot more work than 10 weeks of interning can handle, so now I am working on some more specific results. By focusing in more, I can run codes much faster on longer chunks of data. I made some plots of average wind speed trends over the past 40 years! I’m excited to keep learning as we finish up this internship.
I attended some fun NASA talks this week, starting with one about the National Center for Environmental Predictions (NCEP). I learned about how weather stations across the country (and across the world!) work together to predict weather from hourly to yearly scales. I also went to a talk about giving technical presentations, which was both useful and stressful because our presentations are coming up so fast.
On the SPS side of things, we had a resume workshop with Dr. Crystal Bailey, the head of Career Programs at APS. She gave us some useful resume-building tips and statistics about physics careers. Then, we had a fun chat with Dr. John Mather! Dr. Mather is the coolest and kindest Nobel Prize winner I know, and I’m not just saying that because he’s the only Nobel Prize winner I know. I’ve seen him speak a couple times, and his passion for science and science policy is always inspiring.
On the social side of things, us interns had an impromptu happy hour just because. I found out this week that Rhodes will be all virtual this fall, which is unfortunately the best move. It was nice to just chat about our crazy school/life situations, while also having an intense debate over astrology (astronomy’s more my jam, but you do you). I also had my first Zoom yoga session yesterday, which was surprisingly great. I’m hoping to catch the comet NEOWISE in a bit, so until next week,
Anna Murphree