Can’t believe it, we’re on the 10th week :(. When we were at the half way point of the REU, the last week still seemed so far away. Now, being here on the 10th week, just doesn’t feel real. We’ll all be on a flight back home this Saturday…..far from Iowa….far from each other. Hopefully it won’t be our last goodbye, we’ll see each other many times to come. If we don’t, thank you everyone for making this such a memorable experience. For most summers, even if I go on trips, they start blurring together a little bit but this summer, the people, the adventures, the friends, the experiences, are something I will never truly forget. Also, thank you so much to the mentors and the people involved in making this REU happen. Because of you guys, this experience is one that none of us will forget.
If it isn’t the latest news already, the guys dorm ( Me, Charles, Eli, Thomas), had the fire alarm go off not once, not twice, six time!!! And for what? who knows because your guess is good as ours. We initially thought it was because of my cooking and maybe that was the trigger but we’ve all cooked before where the smoke was a lot worse. After the first alarm went off, I stopped cooking and was just eating dinner with everyone else. It happens until we’re pretty much forced to call the RA on duty. The RA calls maintenance and fixes the faulty alarm that was causing this problem. All is well, right…………..? Welp, stay tuned. Also I took a bite of the worlds hottest chocolate. For reference a ghost pepper is 1 million Scoville unit while this chocolate is 9 million.
Can you believe it? It’s been exactly 20 days since we got here. It’s honestly crazy to me how time just flies by. Yesterday, june 19th, we actually went to Reiman Garden. It was really fun other than the fact that it was boiling hot. I think I would’ve enjoyed it a lot more if it wasn’t so hot. Trying to walk 5 feet without sweating was pretty much impossible but the views made up for it. There was a butterfly garden and I swear every time I visit a butterfly garden, I see new patterns of butterflies. it’s amazing how many different kinds of pattern there are. We also saw this fall colored maple tree. Me and Lale were kind of shocked how that was possible because it shouldn’t be that color in this time of the year. We came to the conclusion that it was genetically modified. It was definitely pretty though.
Soooooo much has happened since last week. We learned Solidworks, a little bit of Blender, and my group got to meet the Storm Lake students. Solidworks was definitely interesting because I’ve never used any sort of CAD software before. It was very challenging at first but once you get the hang of it, you quickly start to understand why it’s so useful. Along with that we started to learn Blender which is similar to Solidworks in a way. Solidworks is functional and has actual things inside the models while Blender is like a wrapper. It’s more objective in the fact that the models are hollow. They appear to be full models but they are indeed not. Lastly, my group met the Storm Lake students! It was so much fun interacting and getting to know them. Facilitating the research was also an interesting experience since none of has done that before, but it was definitely exciting. Until next time, PEACE!
As you know, we went on a walk around a “Large Pond” last weekend (You can see a picture of it on my previous post). Yesterday, we went to something similar, Little Wall Lake in Hamilton Iowa, 20ish minutes drive from ISU. To say the least, it was beautiful. The lake expands very far out but you can still see the shoreline from one side. I’ve attached some pictures of it below. You can also see me and Eli enjoying a very peaceful moment. Anyway, to the juicy point of this post. Me and Eli had a disagreement about what a pond and a lake is. While there is no exact defining features of a Lake vs Pond, other than their body of water size, where I’m from, Lake Erie is A Lake. Same with the Finger Lakes which are huge bodies of water. Now, when I called the first ‘Lake’ we went to for our walk, I called it a Pond. This understandably offended Eli since to him, that’s too big for a lake, and I kind of agreed, so I changed it to a Large Pond. Still, it didn’t sit right with him. In his own words, ‘it’s degrading’. Which I found kind of amusing but I could understand his point of view. Comparing these ‘Lakes’ to something like Lake Erie or Finger lakes, which are considered to be one of the biggest lakes in the country, isn’t very fair. Seeing Little Wall Lake did open my eye a little bit into what a typical lake looks like, I have changed my mind to call these lakes, ‘Little Lakes’ which I hope isn’t as degrading. My standards of a Lake is very high which is a weird thing to have a standard about but what can I say, I’ve been spoiled by Lake Erie which causes literal forms of snow called ‘Lake Effect Snow’.
Monday, everyone’s least favorite day of the week and to be fair, I can understand why. For me though, for first time in a while, I was actually looking forward to this week’s Monday. I was excited to get working on my research and focus on some design thinking solutions. Also, we learned C++ today and that’s one of the few programming languages I kind of stayed away from, mainly because of the syntax. I’m the type of person that makes a lot of small mistakes and I could definitely see myself missing a semi-colon in 400 lines of code. Anyway, going backwards, I had an amazing weekend with everyone from the REU family, especially all of us interns. Most nights we get together and do something, from games to watching movies, we usually end up having a lot of fun. Sunday, we went volunteering at this local bike shop for about 3 hours. It was interesting because the setting was out of the way from most the town and it was next to some old train tracks. It was the perfect setting for a movie titled “we don’t care” where a bunch of rebel teenagers would have a meeting spot LOL. Saturday, we went on this beautiful walk around a small pond and the views were amazing to say the least. You can see the view for yourself in the picture below. Friday was the last day of our first week and wow, it ended with a bang. We got to experience some of the in-house works that the VRAC was doing which included some programs with Augmented Reality, VR Headsets, and much more. My favorite was definitely the Augmented Reality where you were being taught how to make a part of a plane through this headset. The headset would give you instructions on what parts to grab, how to assemble, and ultimately how it should look. It was so practical and easy to use. I can definitely see a future with those headsets teaching you how to put a amazon chair together. Overall, it was a super fun weekend and an awesome way to end the first week of our research internship.
First week is (almost) over! This is my first ever research and I can honestly say I’m super excited. I met one of my faculty mentors today, Kimberly Zarecor, and she already seems very intelligent and well spoken. She took us to arguably, according to a lot of Ames locals, the best restaurant in Ames, Provisions. Unsurprisingly, it was super good. Dr. Kimberly also has a lot of knowledge in Architecture history and she gave me and my team a very good overview of the issues cities such as Buffalo and St. Louis currently face. Earlier today, we also got a lecture on how to research, the process of submitting research is, and the evolutions of research. The lecture was give my none other than our very own mentor, Lale! We also checked out the state gym and that was fun to see. Although admittedly, I already visited it the day before so it was nothing new for me but I will definitely be a regular there. I’ve been a regular gym goer for about a year now and it’s been a fun journey for sure. Seeing that ISU has a big gym was definitely exciting to see to say the least. I’m currently on the PPL route (Push, Pull, Legs) and I do 2 rotations of it each week. Currently, I’ve been deadlifting a lot and my new PR (Personnel Record) is 325lbs conventional. I’ll keep updating as my PR goes up (for anyone that cares). Other than that, it’s been a tiring but also fun first week. I can’t wait to start learning the C++ course next week since I haven’t done much object-oriented programming in a while. It’ll bring back some of the horrors of Scala.
