Brigette Smith, 2018 The Optical Society Intern

Biography

SPS Chapter: Coe College

I am a Junior studying physics at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. I was raised in a small town in Florida and have always been interested in science since I was a little girl. I knew I wanted to be a physicist after I took my first physics course in high school and fell in love with the subject. This ultimately brought me to Coe where I do research producing scintillating glasses and model various glasses with Lammps.

I have always been passionate about science outreach. I work as the outreach coordinator for a women in STEM group at Coe College and help organize demonstrations and lessons in middle schools in the community as well as larger experiments at Coe College for young students. Nothing gives me a greater sense of pride than seeing someone’s eyes light up with curiosity and amazement as a result of these demonstrations. It makes my heart full to be able to pass on my love and sense of wonder for science to someone else and I hope to continue my work in outreach and expose many young minds to a whole new field full of amazing phenomena.

Internship

Host: The Optical Society

Project

Abstract

Outreach is the provision of materials and opportunities to groups that do not have access to them. Science outreach typically involves demonstrations, workshops, or lectures designed to get people interested in science or provide opportunities to learn more or become more involved. This summer I was able to work with the outreach team for The Optical Society where I was exposed to the behind-the-scenes practicalities that go with running outreach programs. I have worked with special program grants on many levels, helped with preparation for OSA events, updated the member database with individual’s events and awards, and created content for both the OSA Discover blog and Optics4kids website. This experience has allowed me to develop skills that will follow me through my career and has given me a look into what a career in science outreach is really like.

Final Presentation

Internship Blog

And So it Begins

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!

What do you even do all day??

Last Saturday OSA hosted their annual “celebration of Inclusion.” OSA just happens to be positioned at the very start of the DC Pride Parade so each year they throw a party on the back patio with food and drinks and music for everyone to enjoy while the parade goes right by. So when Saturday morning comes around I woke up and started getting ready with probably 80% of my fellow interns. Getting ready on that day meant glitter rainbow makeup for myself and everyone, even the boys played along and let us cover them to celebrate. We had a blast at OSA that day, it was the biggest parade I’ve ever been to and everyone was so friendly and happy and proud. It warmed my heart to be a part of something so fabulous. Sunday was much more mild comparatively, we got together and watched the Martian. Great movie by the way, I highly recommend it.

To answer the question I get asked most by the interns, YES I ACTUALLY DO WORK HERE. This past week I have been spot checking excel sheets of registrants to the student leadership conferences over the years against the registrants in the database to see if anyone was missed and needs to be added to the online database, collecting photos from traveling lecturer reports and closing them out, organizing the folders and photographs and checking marketability potential, making lists of universities with optics departments and checking if they have OSA chapters so that we can reach out to those that don’t, and most importantly I’ve been working collecting information about careers in optics and making a plan to create a webpage about it for our optics for kids website as well as researching historical minorities in optics to add to our timeline. My worksite is probably the most fun but work does actually get done I promise.

Outside of work the past week has been busy pretty much each night. I love having such a great group of interns that have kind of become my family to hang out with each evening. My roommate Pheobe is an absolute doll and bought face masks for all of us to do together one evening. It was so much fun to spend some time relaxing and talking with the girls. We were laughing all night long. The next evening a large group of us put a speaker in my back pack and walked down to the tidal pool listening to the old songs Michael had saved on his phone and singing along slightly obnoxiously. It was a blast. Last night we had a family dinner all together and watched the Incredibles to prepare for Incredibles 2 this weekend, I don’t remember that movie being quite so suspenseful; I still strongly believe it’s one of the best pixar movies of all time. Tonights plans are jazz in the garden then a lecture on the Cassini mission. I love that there are so many things to do in DC and having such an amazing group to experience them with.

Networking is key

Late night walks have sort of become my thing lately. I’ve traveled a few times this week down to the tidal basin and around the Lincoln memorial in the evening; the way the lights illuminate the monuments is gorgeous and there’s a certain warm peacefulness about those few quiet moments in big cities. I like to take time to reflect on the things I’ve done and the path that led me here. I am still eternally grateful to be placed in this position. I feel like I’m building friendships that will last over years and I love every single person I get the pleasure of being in this internship with. I’ve come to love the networking aspect of this job. I’ve always been a little shy but I’m trying to do better at introducing myself and making connections at events. This past week OSA had their summer staff event at the DC players club where we had a wonderful lunch and a few competitive games of skeeball and pool. I took the opportunity to get to know some of the other OSA interns from different programs and some of the various staff members I’ll be working with over the summer. This past evening the interns went on a lovely boat cruise down the Potomac river with the SPS executive committee. I forced myself out of my comfort zone and made lots of great connections and learned a lot about the people behind the organization. It was a wonderful evening and the crab cakes were phenomenal.

Aside from the social aspect of the job, work has been picking up a little bit. This past week I was in charge of organizing the application materials for the Deutsch fellowship applicants and creating review packets and response forms for the reviewers. It was a pretty hefty project and caused me quite a bit of stress since it was something that had to be finished right away. My other projects have been milder, just a lot of mundane tasks that need to get done and working with databases and spreadsheets. Im very excited for the next project I’m taking on. I want to produce a short article for the OSA website for LGBT+ in STEM day about how to better be an ally and keep the scientific community a friendly place. I’ve had a few meetings with legal and publications staff members to learn about the citation formats here and the technicalities of using people’s biographies and various images on the careers website. There’s a lot more to all of it than I could have ever guessed. I was also able to attend a science advisors meeting this week that was pretty eye opening in that regard. I listened to a talk about ultra high powered lasers and their applications followed by a report on who is using these technologies and why OSA needs to pursue them more in order to stay relevant in the field. It was really interesting to hear the discussion about why this needs to be an area of interest from the financial and marketing side as well as why it is important for science and opened my eyes a little more to the reasons why certain companies produce in specific areas over others. I still have a lot to learn about the professional world and I’m excited to see what the next few weeks will bring.

Craft your message

OSA ambassadors are emerging leaders in the field of optics and photonics and they provide career advice, technical knowledge and mentorship to students and early career professionals. This week one of our ambassadors, Carlos Lopez-Mariscal visited the office and Jen introduced him to me. He was kind enough to sit and talk for awhile about his career in outreach and answer my questions. We had a really great conversation about how to prepare for first impressions when speaking to colleagues that could be good to have in your network and how to get better when addressing groups. I told him about my position last year helping to organize a program with my Women in STEM group where we were able to work with local middle schools in the area and visit twice a month to do mini mentoring sessions and science lessons/demonstrations. (Shout out to SPS for the grant!) My job in the beginning was to contact principals and school board members and to meet with them to discuss the aims of the program and the plan for implementing it and ultimately get them on board with the idea. I asked him how do you overcome the nerves that come with it in the beginning and how can you make sure you are effective in communicating? He laughed and told me as for the nerves it just comes with practice. You have to work to be good at human interactions and the more you practice the easier it will become for you. To make your interactions truly meaningful you need to make sure the person clearly understands what you want to say and that you clearly understand them. You need to take time to craft your message. Find the perfect words to describe what you mean and craft your message to be precise and powerful. That really stuck with me. I’ve ran into the situation many times in meetings and in front of the classroom where I knew what I wanted to say and how I wanted to progress but I would find myself getting tripped up in delivery and I feel like this could really help me. I’m truly taking his advice to heart because I want to improve my professional speaking. I am very lucky to have gotten the chance to hear his advice and learn from someone who has been working in this profession for a long time now.

On a separate note, today is my birthday and my family came out to visit DC and spend some time with me. Last night we went walking down to the washington monument, the Vietnam and Korean war memorials, and the Lincoln memorial. It was really wonderful to be able to show my family those things and get a chance to spend some time with them. This morning we went to the Museum of natural history, the Smithsonian palace, and the museum of Native American history. It was great to get to see the museums and experience it with my family. My little sisters were so excited in the natural history museum, and I’m not going to lie I didn’t see the entire thing when I first visited so I was overjoyed to see the dinosaurs. Tomorrow I think we plan to visit Arlington, the air and space museum, and then see where the day takes us.

Collect Perspectives

This week, aside from finishing up the excel sheets finally, I’ve been working really hard to create an OSA Discover blog post for LGBT in STEM day (July 5th). The rainbow has become the symbol for the LGBT community and happens to be an optical phenomenon resulting from light interacting with water droplets in the air. I won’t say much more here but if you’re interested in learning more about the history and science behind the rainbow check out my post! It was actually really fun to work on this project and I’m pretty proud of how it came out. I also made the graphics myself which was really enjoyable to work on. I’m trying to work more on my writing since I feel like it is one of my weaknesses and these posts have been a good opportunity for that. I’ve also been working on a post about diversity and inclusion and how to help make your professional environment more inclusive. I plan to release that one on Monday. Afterwards I want to finish refining the text for the optics for kids career site and hopefully start getting some of that content put up.

I’ve been continuing trying to expand my network and take advantage of being in DC. I went to have coffee this week with the senior director of OSA and we talked a lot about his experience in graduate school, how it affected him and his personal life and his advice for me as an undergraduate student getting ready for grad school. He actually went to school for engineering and policy instead of physics like I plan to but I’ve found that it is good to hear everyone’s experiences even if they aren’t in your desired field. You can hear about jobs and fields you never knew existed and they may even be something you’re interested in. Life advice is always great to hear regardless of what the person is doing with their life and just by talking to someone about what you want to do you open yourself to the possibility of a connection. David even gave me a few contacts and names of people in physics I may want to try to connect with. Never stop trying to form new connections with people and collect perspectives every chance you get, you never know what experiences people have had and when they may be relevant to you.

It’s crazy to me that we’re about halfway through this internship now. It has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. I wonder if anyone else is starting to feel anxiety thinking about it ending. I worry that I won’t get everything I want done and that my ambitions are too much but I won’t let those fears swallow me. I think I always have done best under pressure, and this isn’t much different. I have a few more projects I’m hoping to finish up before the summer ends so it’s time to really grind now.

OSA and Capitol Hill

Work has been pretty intense lately. I have been taking on new tasks every week and I’m always so worried I’ll let one of the smaller projects slip through the cracks. At the same time it feels pretty great that my supervisors feel that I’m doing well enough to be able to handle new and more difficult tasks. Recently I’ve taken on the responsibility of collecting the funding request forms and information from chapters, bundling them with the award letters and preparing them for the financial department on top of checking the follow-up reports daily. I produced another blog post for the OSA Discover blog this week on Creating an Inclusive Environment in Science . (Shout out to Krystina Williamson, Michael Welter, and Stephanie Williams for helping me revise it.) I also have recently been assisting with the Deutsch Fellowship. I was in charge of collecting and bundling all the materials from the applicants, building a fillable PDF for responses and calculating the average scores for each candidate. I’m currently working to get all of the past Student Leadership Conference attendees in the NetForum database and check that all of the OSA Foundation awards were logged properly or log them in NetForum. Sometimes the work can be a little tedious but I love working here so much still. It’s such a wonderful atmosphere and I feel like I’m doing pretty well at the things I’ve been doing. I still have a lot I want to accomplish this summer and I am excited to see what I can do.

This week we had the tour of OSA which was nice. We had a resume and CV workshop with Danielle Weiland which was really great for her to come do for us and then met with Greg Quarles and Mike Duncan who are the science advisors for OSA. We heard a little about their lives and their advice for us as science students going forward. Afterwords Elizabeth Rogan, the CEO of OSA, came to talk to us a little bit before we walked around some of the floors of the building. We ended with pizza on the 6th floor. OSA has a wonderful staff lounge/kitchen with a balcony that was a really lovely place to have everyone hang out afterwards. I also got to take a tour on capitol hill which was amazing. We got to sit in on the Energy and Research subcommittee hearing on “Big Data Challenges and Advanced Computing Solutions.” It was a really interesting to hear the discussion between the representatives and the experts. They asked them questions about the future of big data analysis and the logistics of the research but the most interesting question came from representative Etsy who asked about what was being do to diversify the scientists programming AIs. She brought up the fact that if all the scientists programming AIs were too similar then the AI would learn in a way that resembled only one type of ideals and that we need a diverse population of scientists training the AIs to avoid this. It was a really interesting thing to think about. We also got to meet Dr. Foster which was really awesome. After this we went to the capitol building. It was breathtaking honestly. My favorite part was seeing the rotunda. The artwork was simply amazing. Sam came prepared too and told us all about the paintings and what was represented in each one. It was an amazing experience. We ended up saving the Library of Congress for another day since we were all pretty tired after everything. I’m really excited for visiting that and I want to have plenty of time and energy for it.

I’m still loving my time in DC. I feel as if I’ve made a lot of great connections in the area. The senior director of OSA has been introducing me to some of his colleagues which has been really cool. I also feel like I have built some strong relationships with the other interns. It’s really great to be around so many intelligent and wonderful people. There’s always an interesting conversation happening. My favorite of the week has been debating the packing efficiency of the capitol buildings elevators with Collin. Are we talking about the packing fraction or the packing efficiency? How should we approximate a persons measurements and should we account for personal space? Do we take into acount the empty space above someones head or should we calculate the possible efficiency if all space is used? How comfortable are the people on this elavator? It’s questions like this that make living with physics students so entertaining. I wish this summer would never end.

Another Sunday at OSA

The beginning of this week has been rather mundane. At this point in the internship I’m pretty settled into my daily routines. I know what I need to get done everyday and all the projects I have are very similar to things I’ve been doing throughout the summer. I’m shifting my focus back towards the career resource page for optics4kids and have been doing a lot of research on careers in optics and their job requirements. It’s a fun project but it is definitely a little difficult to figure out how to explain what a Ophthalmic Laboratory Technician is to kids. My current plan is to separate jobs into the categories of academia, industry, and government. The difficult part is deciding where to place certain things and figuring out how to accurately explain the difference between doing research in a national lab and doing research at a university. I think I have built up a solid reservoir of optics related jobs though and I even asked for a little input from the OSA Ambassadors so I’m excited to see how it turns out. Now I’m trying to help get everything set up for the Second OSAF Innovation school going on next week. The Innovation School is a four-day boot-camp designed to help attendees grow as an innovator and build the skills necessary to thrive in the innovation economy. The school features several speakers and workshops that are designed to be helpful for those interested in innovation as a career. I will be helping out with the school while it is going on. I am the lucky lady who gets to come to OSA at 3 PM Sunday to help with any last minute set up and help welcome the students this year and help them find the places they need to be in. I’m actually really excited to meet the participants and be a part of the school so I don’t really mind sacrificing a little bit of my weekend. I am very much not excited for the next week though. I will be arriving each morning between 7:15 and 7:30 to help set up for breakfast and welcome participants. This one is going to be kind of hard for me as I am very much not a morning person. I am lucky enough that my work day starts at 9 AM and OSA isn’t a far walk so I don’t even get out of bed until about 7:45. You could say I’m slightly bitter about the idea of waking up so early but I also was the one who volunteered to help out so I can’t complain too much. As a whole I am very excited about next week’s innovation school. I’m lucky to get a chance to listen to the talks and attend any workshops I like also so I hope I am able to take something good away from the experience as well as meet some interesting young professionals in innovation.

Speaking of networking, I almost forgot I was able to attend the Sixth Annual Science, Technology, Engineering, the Arts, and Mathematics (STEAM) Fair and Reception this week as a representative for OSA. The event was hosted by the Women’s Congressional Policy Institute and had many exhibits from both private and public sector STEAM programs. I was tasked with attending the event and scoping out the exhibitors to find if there was anyone in attendance that OSA should look into collaborating with on outreach events or programs. This means I was just looking for groups whose mission was to promote STEAM Education with a higher priority on groups that were working to improve the minority population in science and introducing myself and OSA to them to try to form a relationship for future partnership. It was a really great opportunity to meet a lot of amazing and inspirational women and also really awesome to be representing OSA at an event like this. I was really proud that my supervisors trusted me to take charge on the networking event, but I guess networking is kind of my thing.

NASA, NIST, and Innovation

This past week has probably been the busiest of the summer for me. Sunday evening I came in to OSA early to finish preparing the conference room for Innovation school and set up a table for participants to check in. I was a little stressed out because the name tags came late and I had to put them all in the sleeves but I managed to finish right as the first participants arrived. I wasn’t able to really listen to the talk on Sunday night because I was on door duty but everyone seemed to have enjoyed it. I was sent over to The Mad Hatter a little early to make sure everything was ready for dinner and greet the participants again once they made it to the venue. Dinner was pretty great. I got to speak to some of the people about what they do and why they were interested in attending. The whole time leading up to the school I was expecting the participants to be students or very early career professionals but as it turns out I was speaking with many experienced men and women working for various companies. The next morning I was back at OSA by 7:30 to help set up breakfast for the school. I helped Jen get everything ready and went back to the table to greet participants as they began arriving. After breakfast there was a talk about business models that I sat in on and really enjoyed. I haven’t ever really taken a business class so I learned a lot. The participants then had to come up with a product or service they wanted to pitch and make teams. They were going to work on these over the next few days and present final pitches to a panel of judges at the end. The top three pitches get the offer to continue pursuing the idea and recieve a little funding. I only really helped with lunch after that since the teams were broken up and working on their pitches and I was getting off work before the other talks. The next two days I wasn’t able to attend the school since I was on a tour at NIST and then a tour at NASA.

I was so excited to go to NIST. I have been using data from NIST in my simulations for two years now so I was super excited to visit the place where they actually find potentials. We met with Jesus’ mentor first thing in the morning and he told us a little about the history of NIST and how they operate under the department of commerce and why it is so important to have standards set. After we left there we visited a lab that had more to do with materials research. I had a total geek moment when the man started telling us about his research and about using the NMR and the science behind it. It was like the last two years at Coe had set me up specifically just to be able to understand this quick talk. I’ve always wanted to work in a lab like that and I was so excited to find I was able to understand the research going on. It gave me this new hunger to keep up with my research and work hard to really learn about the materials. After that we visited an apple tree on the grounds that is a direct descendent from a tree in Newton’s orchard. I thought it was the greatest thing in the world. In the afternoon we visited the nano tech lab which was really neat. I wasn’t as excited since I didn’t know anything about the equipment or what was actually going on with the research. Nonetheless the facility was really nice and impressive.

The next morning I headed to NASA Goddard. Collin and Daniel made it a point to schedule our tour on Wednesday so that we could attend the science jamboree that was happening. It was really a great event. There were tables for all kinds of different NASA projects and demonstrations. My personal favorite was the innovation lab table. I was able to try on some augmented reality goggles that showed the Earth and its magnetosphere from space. I talked with one of the ladies on the outreach team for the innovation lab as well about what they were doing for outreach and got some contact information from her. I tried to talk with as many scientists as I could about their research projects and was really surprised in the diversity of things going on. We got to visit both Collin and Daniel’s labs after and hear a little about what they’ve been doing this summer after which was really neat. Then we went to the visitors center which was just breathtaking. I was really impressed by the space pictures and science sphere.

The last day of innovation school was really intense. I was in charge of breakfast by myself and was at OSA by 7:09 (It’s a new record for me). I was doing all of the running for supplies and any set up that needed to be done. I helped with lunch and the final reception and clean up. I ended up staying until about 6 PM. I was absolutely exhausted after this week but there were a lot of really cool moments. I’m really glad I got to be a part of innovation school.

The End is Nigh

This week at work has been a little different since my main supervisors are away at Siegman International School on Lasers in Sweden. That means I have been mostly working on wrapping up my various projects as I see fit and reporting to the OSAF director. I put together an OSA Discover blog post about innovation school last week, which makes a total of three published postings of my own. In fact, this entire page is all content written by me! Aside from that I finished adding the 2010 Student Leadership Conference attendees to OSA’s database. That was the last year that needed to be added since it was on a separate spreadsheet, which means I have now successfully finished adding ALL of the past Student Leadership attendants into the database! That doesn’t sound like it was that bad of a task but I repeated the process for over 1500 people on just the SLC project alone. I also finished adding the OSAF Awards into the database this week so I hope that is the end of my data entry days. I’m a little nervous about wrapping up my careers project, which is really the last major thing I want to accomplish while I’m at OSA. I’ve been kind of touching on it all summer long, doing research in between my other projects and working on building the website map, but it has been really hard for me to wrap my head around exactly what I want out of it. The goal is to create a resource page on the Optics4Kids website that will allow them to see some cool jobs that are related to optics but the challenge arises in trying to describe what an ophthalmic technician is in words that children can easily understand and still make it sound exciting. This summer has really made me work on my writing and word manipulation abilities which has been really great for me since that has always been my weakness but sometimes I feel like there is smoke blowing out of my ears trying to figure out how to say exactly what I want to. I really want to pull it together very well and make it into something that can help get kids interested in optics for a career one day since there are so many really neat jobs and projects that surround the subject. It has definitely been my most difficult task this summer.

Luckily I’ve been able to take a few breaks from it all this week for meetings that I set up. This summer I have been doing a LOT of networking and going out of my way to meet people, make connections, and ask questions about what they do and how they got where they are. This week I was able to meet with Kim DeRose, a communications specialist at the National Academy of Sciences, to talk about her experience. (Shout out to David Lang for connecting me with so many of his colleagues and just being awesome) We talked a lot about her experience in grad school and how she got into science communications and the doors that it opened up for her. We also talked a lot about how to better develop communication skills and how they can help you as you continue in your career. Being able to communicate effectively with different groups really makes a big difference in your options going forward in life. I also was able to speak with a graduate student at University of Michigan this past week which was really great. We talked about her experience there, how she chose that school, and how she has been able to balance her studies and her extracurriculars that she is involved with. It was a very insightful conversation and I was really impressed with the things she said about the school. Being able to connect with so many different people has probably been the best and most beneficial part of my entire summer. I have learned so much just by speaking to different people about their lives and career paths and has really opened my eyes to all of the different options I have. I’m really sad that this internship is coming to an end but I am so thankful to have gotten the opportunity to have such a valuable experience here. I am pretty proud of the work I have done and hope I can produce just a few more things before I call it finished.

The Tears Start Coming and They Don’t Stop Coming

I am writing this as I sit on my balcony in Bangkok overlooking the most beautiful vegetation I have seen in my life. It’s a dream come true to be living in and exploring Thailand and yet as I reflect on this summer I can’t help but feel a deep sadness and longing to be back in Washington DC with the amazing individuals I was able to share this internship with. It was so wonderful to be surrounded by such driven and intelligent people; I have never felt more inspired.

This summer I learned a lot at the Optical Society. I learned all about the logistics of running outreach programs, membr tracking, how program grants work, and creating media content for outreach. I realized that there is so much more that goes into it than I ever thought there would be. It really helped prepare me for putting together outreach events in the future and gave me a little more insight into the process behind large scale events. The most valuable thing I learned though was about the importance of networking and communications. I learned about making connections and how these can help you moving forward in life and open new doors for you. I learned a lot about the importance of crafting your message and making sure that you communicate effectively exactly what you want to say. As someone who has been studying almost exclusively science and mathematics for the last few years communication is something I definitely struggle with quite a bit. This summer I did my best to meet as many people as I could and get advice on how to grow these skills and learn about their paths in life and how they came to be where they are. This opened my eyes to so many potential avenues going forward that I had never even considered.

Aside from the things my actual job taught me, the things I have gained from this internship has been invaluable. I’ve learned so much about professionalism and preparing for a career but also I got the chance to know so many wonderful people. I gained so many amazing friends that I am so lucky to have had the chance to meet in my lifetime. The people in this internship this year were truly amazing in every single way. I have never met people who have so much ambition and are so hard working. Seeing the things these people have accomplished in their lifetime inspired me to work so much harder on my own projects. More so, I have never been surrounded by such an uplifting group. Everyone wanted only to encourage and support everyone else. There were many times I had the interns look over my work and asked for suggestions for revisions or asked them for help with a part of a project I was unsure about. We really became a family and leaving them was one of the hardest goodbyes I’ve been through. I will forever be grateful for all of the memories, late night life talks, laughter, and adventures we shared.

It is with the heaviest heart that I end this last blog with this message for the 2018 interns:

To all of you, thank you sincerely for the best summer of my life. I know each of you will go on to do extraordinary things and I can’t wait to see the impact you will have on this world.