And So it Begins

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Thursday, June 7, 2018

By:

Brigette Smith

The process of moving to Washington DC was a real hassle. I've never moved by myself before and I took a plane on top of that. It was pouring raining when I arrived and I had to try to drag three giant suitcases around GWU campus to find Amsterdam hall. My bags kept falling over or making it impossible to get through doors but once I FINALLY made it into my room and got everything settled things started looking up. I put on some comfortable clothes, set my bags aside and took a nice long nap until my roommates started to arrive. I instantly liked all three of them which was a huge relief, I was pretty nervous about meeting them. Each one of them is extremely sweer and we agree on a lot of the things about how to efficiently share and use our space. I began meeting the rest of the interns the next morning when we went to our orientation and everyone was so lovely. We started talking over the course of the day and all agreed to have a dinner together that night. We all pretty much clicked right away. Everyones personalities seems to work well together and I love everyone already. After dinner a few of us went out and walked down to the Licoln Memorial and the Washington monument and it was really amazing to see. I still can't believe I'm actually in Washington DC. 

Being in this city is definitely taking some getting used to. I've never lived in a big city before and I'm trying to get the hang of public transit and sharing my personal space with so many people. Luckily OSA is close enough to my housing that I can actually walk to and from work each day and get my cardio in. I'm so excited to be working for OSA this summer. I love the energy here, everyone is super nice and spunky. I have my own cubicle and even 3 computer screens to help keep everything I'm working on organized and it makes it very easy to look across excel workbooks and find information online at the same time. This is nice because one of the projects I'm working on requires me to look at an excel sheet of OSA chapters and find the identifications codes then search the database to find the grant follow-up report and collect the pictures from the projects. Then I sort all of the photos and try to find ones that are good for marketablity. On top of these I've also been trying to sort through the massive expanse of archived photos from OSA events looking for photos. This project hasn't been so bad but what I'm really excited to work on is the Optics for kids website. I'm going to be revamping the careers part of the site and I want to make it a lot more informational about the different types of careers an optical scientist can have and what those jobs entail. I also want to expand on the current people in optics tab. Most of the scientists listed fit the white male demographic and I want to update the site to better reflect the diversity of optical scientists. This part is particularly exciting for me because it means I get to research some very interesting scientists and learn more about the different projects in optics and the lives of scientist from a wide variety of different backgrounds in different places!

Brigette Smith