Wednesday, August 3, 2016
By:
This week was spent further developing the plans for my own tour as well as working on my long term project while at work. I finally came close to organizing and collecting all of the materials I had researched by Thursday afternoon and I had only four chapters left to comb from a National academies report before finishing completely.
As far as planning my tour went I was able to secure a tour guide four the Capitol building as well as get several high ranking staff in my office, including the Chief of Staff, to agree to come and speak with this year’s group of SPS Interns. Im getting pretty excited for the tour i’m planning here! Also, we got a tour of NIST this week and get to tour NASA Goddard as well next week!
After spending time here in DC I have become acutely aware or some things. Probably the least expected was regarding weather. I have always been told that the weather in Northern California is paradise but I had never been anywhere else long enough to truly see this. The idea of summer rains was rather foreign to me. For that matter, winter rains are rather foreign to me with hoe long California has been in a drought! It can go from hot and sunny to rain and flooding and thunderstorms and back to sunny in a matter of a single afternoon. I have since resorted to taking my umbrella with me to work every day because I am never sure when a storm will pass by!
The tour of NIST was stander, as expected of course. I definitely do not mean boring by being standard. We were able to go to several labs and see some of the different things being worked on at NIST. I think my favorite part of the tour was seeing the Watt Balance. This is an incredibly sensitive machine designed to determine a more accurate weight for the kilogram. They even made a working lego model of the machine which was super cool to see! I definitely will not forget that tour anytime soon!
Demitri Call