Sunday, August 5, 2018
By:
Brigette and I spent Friday night biking around DC. On Saturday I was reminded of how uch I miss my people in Iowa. The other Coe physics students and I had a conference video call with us and prospective students, but we also got a chance to talk with each other before and after Jesus, Amanda, and I biked around the area, and even found a little outdoor fitness area. This week was quite a week, I must say. The NASA poster session was this past week, which meant I only had a few days to process all my data and make my poster, and I had a lot of data to process. It was a lot of sleepless nights, but I finally got everything together in time for the session on Thursday, printing my poster out that morning.
The poster session was super cool, I got to nerd out about my research to plenty of people, friends visited, and I got to show off everything I had been working on the last two months. It was also quite humbling to make a poster with the NASA logo AND my name together on the same poster.
That night, Rees and I decided we wanted to give a “Thank you” to our mentors for all their help this summer. Larry, one of mentors, couldn’t stop talking about this pistachio crusted lamb his wife made for weeks, and I lost a bet to Adrian, my other mentor, the bet being over ribs. So, after a long night of cooking, boiled over rice all over Rees’s bedroom (there wasn’t any space for the rice cooker in the kitchen), and a pound of burnt vegetables later (We fell asleep cooking the cauliflower), we had quite a lunch prepared! Larry and Adrian loved it, and the burnt vegetables mixed in with the rice wasn’t half bad! My mom and sister also came on a camping trip down to DC, after the lunch with our mentors, I took them through a tour of NASAs campus and walked down to Georgetown that night.
We said goodbye to Sam today, he’s on his way to Finland for an international SPS conference. We threw a picnic, reflecting on our time this summer, in disbelief that our summer is almost over.
Collin Flynn