Stephanie Williams, 2018 AIP Center for History of Physics Intern

Biography

SPS Chapter: University of Maryland-College Park

I am from Silver Spring, Maryland, and currently go to school at the University of Maryland in College Park. I am a rising fourth year student studying both astronomy and physics. At the University of Maryland, I am involved in many groups including SPS, Women in Physics, Astronomy Gentleladies Network, AstroTerps, and the Physics MakerSpace. I have a leading role in both the Maker Space and SPS, of which I have been a leading proponent in building their outreach programs to the larger community. I am the current President of SPS, and plan to bring more diverse representations of what a physicist is to our meetings over the coming year. I have done a few different types of research in my time at UMD, including working at the UMD observatory searching for exoplanets, analyzing Quantum Optics data, though my main work had been with Carter Hall on the LZ Dark Matter Detector experiment in radon detection efficiency.

Outside of my life as a student, I babysit and nanny for most of my income, along with working as the childcare coordinator and volunteering as a religious education teacher for Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church. I plan lessons every week for my classes, focusing on diversity of religions and cultures worldwide to increase exposure and promote acceptance in the children I teach. I have worked as a teacher here for the past 3 years, after a year of assisting other teachers. I hope to bring the skills I have gained in my nearly 10 years of experience of childcare and education to the physics field and develop new innovative ways to make STEM education accessible, representative, and interesting for children all over the country.

Internship

Host: American Institute of Physics

Project

Abstract

In this talk I will review the work I have done over the summer with the Center for History of Physics Women and Minorities Teaching Guides Project. Working with the Neil’s Bohr Archival Library and the Emilio Segre Visual Archives I have compiled six unique lesson plans, available online for free. The project’s goal is to provide underrepresented groups role models in the field. This summer, the focus of the project shifted to Latinx, Native American, and LGBT+ physicists. The guides I created explore the lives and careers of Luis Alvarez, Wanda Diaz-Merced, Victor Blanco, Fred Begay, Alan Turing and Sally Ride. I will explain the background of the project, the experiences I had working in it, and the effect the summer has had on me.

Final Presentation

Internship Blog

Getting settled in

So it is early in the morning of my third workday, and so far I am really enjoying working here at AIP. I was really nervous about performing well, being professional enough, and living up to the expectations set for me as an intern, but the experience is much different from what I expected!

The rooms we have are really nice and spacious, and having a full kitchen in the apartment is amazing. I really like my roommates too, which is always a plus. In the 4 days since we moved in, I feel like I know them very well and we are all good friends, not just 4 people awkwardly shoved in the same space. After our first day at our sites, My roommates and I hosted an SPS intern family type dinner. We made pasta, and Sarah made homemade alfredo sauce to share, and other brought other dishes. Some other people have gone out to the mall in DC a couple of times since, but I have been there so much in my life I decided to relax instead. But everyone still gets along really well so far it seems.

The first day was really nice, with a lot of orientation material. It was really driven home that this program is more than a typical internship in that we are expected to network and have social activities planned as well. They really want everyone to feel like an active member of the physics community, and to get hands-on job experience. I didn’t know they were going to pay for us to go to a conference within the next year to present what we worked on here, and we have a symposium for our peers and mentors at the end of the summer! It is really interesting to hear what all the other interns are doing in our group chat, and learn about the different things a physicist can do from that. We also use it to invite each other and plan social things, such as going to pride this weekend! Over the course of the summer, each intern group will give tours to the other interns as well and show each other our sites! I am really excited for that especially, and to be able to show what I am doing is important!

After the first day, we started learning about and working on our sites individually. I work most closely with Mikayla and Kristen, so we have had daily orientations together learning how to use all the resources in the Neils Bohr Library for our projects. I am really excited to see how theirs turned out! And all the people working in AIP specifically made a group chat as well, and we usually commute ina group, as well as get lunch together. Except for Micheal! Micheal got up and left at 6:30 to use the AIP gym, which is free for the interns as well! AIP really takes care of us it seems. They give us a free gym, free coffee, and tea, as well as full kitchen use on each floor. There are company parties for people’s birthdays we have been invited too, as well as monthly picnics! The women on my floor made sure I knew where to get supplies and how to personalize my office with anything I want or need for support, comfort, and design. The work environment is really relaxed and flexible. I definitely bought clothes that were too fancy for this job, but that is ok. It is more business causal daily, and then regular casual Fridays. We are allowed to wear jeans and t-shirts, as long as they are proper in their design obviously. and hours are flexible as well! as long as i am here for 8 hours it is fine if I come in at 7 and leave at 3, or come in at 10 and leave at 6! if i take a longer lunch break and stay later that is ok too! they are so nice here it is unbelievable. We went on a tour and everything here is so cool. They have Feynman’s high school notebooks and gorgeous wall art everywhere. There is also a lot of clubs and activities on the AIP campus. They have a book club and yoga classes, some people get together Tuesdays and Thursdays at lunch to watch movies too! I am in love.

All of this, and I haven’t even talked about my project yet! I am working on teaching guides for the AIP database. This summer my mentor, Greg Good, wants me to focus on Latinx physicists and LGBT physicists. So far I have gone over the formatting needed for each teaching guide and started going through a directory fo names. The guides are way more involved than I was expecting, so if you are going to do this internship in the future, I would highly suggest becoming familiar with them as soon as possible. The thing I am the most worried about is becoming fluent in the Common Core requirements for public school. Each teaching guide has the common core requirements they meet on them, so it is easier for teachers to use them. But this is a format that is completely different from when I started high school myself,8 years ago now, when common core didn’t exist. I hope I use it properly and over time it isn’t as intimidating. I like that each section of the lesson plan has instructions for what the teachers do and what the students so. I have written lesson plans before, for my religious education classes at Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church, and I try to use a similar format, but the teaching guides are better. They also have a section for a sort of alternate activity, which is sometimes filled out, and other times is not. One thing I do want to take from my teaching experience thus far is including alternate activities/suggestions for how to make each activity accessible for different groups. When I make lesson plans for my religious education classes, I use the tapestry fo Faith database, and each lesson plan has a section about how to make this lesson more acceptable for people with disabilities. I think that would really help the flexibility of these teaching guides!

other than going over the format, I have gone through the “Directory of Spanish Surnamed and Native Americans in Science and Engineering” which was written by J.V. Martinez.... in 1972. So the directory is horribly outdated, and many of the people in it are not in our database at all.. but it has been a really good starting place for me to find other people. I am really interested in learning more about Louis W. Alvarez, who takes up almost every listing under Alvarez in our database now(over 65 entries just for him!). I am also thinking of contacting SACNAS and asking them for a more updated list of people they think would be good candidates. They are an entire group of Chicanos and Native Americans in STEM, so I think it would be a great place to start.

Alright, I have to wrap up and go to today’s orientation, I’ll check in later!

Feeling Productive

These past few days have been hectic and busy and amazing! I wanted to blog more last week, but I didn’t get the chance while working so much. I mainly just took a few pictures of my work outfits because I am very happy with how my new fancy clothes look haha.
Getting up and out of the house has gotten easier now that I am on a schedule. and the free coffee and tea AIP gives is really helpful (the third floor also has free cocoa).

This year AIP is trying really hard to make sure we have enough resources for LGBTSTEM day, coming up on July 5th, and as such, I have worked really hard creating resources for this. Though every department is too, to be fair. Since my last post I have an almost completed guide done for Luis Alvarez, which got put on hold for now, Made a persons of interest list for LGBT physicists, created a selected reading guide, an annotated bibliography of those sources, created a new exhibit for Alan Turing to celebrate Pride month in the library, and developed and finished 2 teaching guides on 2 physicists. The first one I did was on Alan Turing, the father of modern-day computers. it was really interesting learning about him and his life, though also incredibly sad. The way he died was disheartening, but it was nice to be able to say we have come very far since then. In my research, I found the agent who fired him for his homosexuality in his lifetime, the National Physical Laboratory, is now one of the sponsors for the LGBTSTEM Day events. Progress for sure. It was also really amazing to see how many people talk about him now, and how many things are named after him! The law which pardons gay men from their “crime” of being gay in history past is even called the Turing law. At the end of this lesson plan, I added a list of modern-day resources for the queer scientist in STEm, and it was incredibly heartwarming to see all the things out there. There are multiple organizations for social events and pushing for equality as well as out lists of people in the field who are out in their sexuality. There are even conferences just for LGBT people in STEM, namely the oSTEM conference, which I am hoping to go to this November. As someone who identifies as bi/pansexual myself, this means a lot to me, to be working on some of the first historical documentation of LGBT scientists. Maybe after this, I will work on writing a book. Who knows?

The second lesson plan I worked on was for Sally Ride, which I was unpleasantly surprised to find we had very little information on in the library here, but that means I get to help pick out the books we buy to fill the void! She was an interesting woman overall, as well as a closet lesbian. She was outed, with her permission I should add, by her partner after her death. She also worked a lot in outreach programs later in her life, which was really inspiring to me. I fell very often that many people treat my work in outreach as a cute hobby that I do in my free time from my research. and that is very invalidating of the importance of this work. This is the work that inspires people to push themselves harder to get into science, to make the effort, to try, because even though it is hard, and they will struggle, having that one role model they can connect to? That let them know it is possible. That is what is important.

Tomorrow night I was planning on throwing a big dinner for the interns again, and I am hoping that goes well.
Friday all the interns are planning on going to the Cassini briefing downtown after work to see all the things Cassini did in its lifetime, which I am really excited for!
After we are planning on going to see Incredibles 2 which is going to be really fun, I have looked forward to seeing it for a while :)

Then Monday I will be back to work, but that night I am having a small party for my birthday with the Interns! I am hoping to keep it chill land just bake a cake a have some wine and play board games :)

Lots of fun things for sure. I am curious to see where my work will go from here, but I should probably get back to it now. I am going to send an email to my advisor, who is out-of-town, to check my work, and if he likes it, it will be a featured piece for LGBTSTEM Day. Very exciting.

Ok, bye for now guys!

Birthdays and Boats

It is Friday morning and I have stared at my computer screen trying to plan what to write for 20 minutes. Last night was the boat cruise, and needless to say, I am exhausted. This week has been very exciting and filled with marvelous things, but very tiring.

I wasn’t sure what was going to happen Monday with my birthday, but it ended up being very exciting. It was the first real time I was able to meet with my mentor, Greg Good, as he has been out of town on vacation. I worried about the teaching guides I was working on were wrong. When I started the job, I was told the average amount of teaching guides an intern finishes a summer was 4-6. So far I have completed 4, and it is only week 3. So I was very concerned I was missing something, but it turns out I have done them a lot quicker! I have gotten so much done in such a short time my mentor is giving me more diverse assignments! This week I was allowed to clean the shared drive up on the computer, which I desperately wanted to do. It was bad guys, the other interns were told not to touch their shared drives. I also did some of my first Archival work!

When I started, Greg asked me to make lesson plans on Latinx and Native American physicists. J.V. Martinez made a directory of Latinx and Native American surnamed physicists back in 1972. It was a good starting point. Greg asked me to go through the APS records to find what meeting was responsible for its creation. Who wanted to put this into play? What caused people back in 1972 to start caring about keeping this type of record? how did this evolve into the committee on minorities? It was all very interesting to see that start on some other programs in the meeting notes around this time. I read about the creation of the Committee of Women in physics in 1971, and saw the first changes it influenced. And I saw the first SPS chapters asking for access to journals, like Physics Today, from APS. Unfortunately, though, I could not find the start of the committee. It shows up with an interim report in 1972 out of nowhere! With no mention of the Directory! But! J.V. Martinez loves in Silver Spring M.D.! My hometown, which is only around 15 minutes away! Greg said we may be able to schedule an oral history interview with Martinez! Then we can ask about his involvement in creating the directory! Which would be exciting, but it is still very much in the air. I was also invited to present with my mentor at the APPT conference and got my registration waived from SPS! I am excited to go! This will be my 6th conference since my first last October! I love conferences!

After talking with my mentor, I went to see Amanda. Amanda decided to work on some demo videos for her internship, and made Liquid Nitrogen Ice cream! So I got to take a break and talk with people about their work and eat ice cream for a while. After the day ended I went back home to the apartment and relaxed for a while. Then Elon surprised me by making dinner for my birthday! And a cake! Phoebe got everyone together to sign a card, and Nathan made guacamole! People brought tons of stuff and we had a little party and played board games. It was relaxing, and everything I wanted for my birthday. My friend Emma came to and I had a very good time. :)

Tuesday I did a couple interesting things at work. In the morning the ACP interns were all invited to model for the new Grad School Shopper Posters! anyone of us could be on the newest poster distributed all across the country! Besides that, I started on a new teaching guide, the 4th one I recently finished. Wednesday was relaxing. We had an AIP meeting to go to, and we dressed up to take a picture for LGBT pride month! It was interesting to see behind the scenes work of AIP, and all the effort that goes into making it run. After we had an amazing barbeque lunch with ice cream from UMD dairy ( my heart, I love UMD dairy ice cream). It was great to see the effort AIP puts into building the community and how they care about their employees. After work, I went home and relaxed for the first time in a while. I starting watching the new season of Queer Eye on Netflix, and it is amazing!

Yesterday I finished my recent lesson plan about Victor Blanco and after work there was the cruise! It was so much fun getting ready with Mikayla and Elon and driving in my car with all the ACP people. We got to sing together in the car and hype Michael up for his birthday! He turned 21 on the cruise! We all ended up doing photo shoots and walking around the boat a million times. The food was AMAZING (Kudos to the chef of the Odyssey boat cruise, you’re killin it). I had lobster soup, Crab cakes, and a killer chocolate cake. Everyone was so excited to be there we all tried each other’s food and got to taste a little of everything though! We drank and danced, and learned how to do the wobble from the DJ. It was all such a great time bonding and connecting with everyone.

Today Corrine brought the AIP interns Donuts for breakfast! Yet, Friday morning is always free bagels from Mike from IT. Later we have a lunch with the executive board of SPS, which is more free food and networking. Then we have finished week three. Already wishing there were more.

Week 4: Archives, Astronomy, and Anxiety

I last left you on Friday, after the boat trip. Of course much has happened since. Saturday was Astronomy on the Mall, though unfortunately the mall was rained out and we had to go into a local school instead. Many people still came and we all had a wonderful time. I got to touch of a piece of the moon, and learn about the Chandra Space Telescope. My boyfriend Shawn joined in and helped teach kids about how gravity works with a gravitational well.

One thing that happened though made me sad, and think about some goals for the future. Many children in DC are of minority status. Many of them are bilingual, though grow up learning Spanish as their primary language. I have had some Spanish classes in school, and it was always something I was meaning to get better at, in theory, but never worked towards. One little girl came up to my demo and was speaking Spanish, and I realized at though i could explain astronomy to a 4-year-old, I had done it all night, but I had no idea how to do it in Spanish. Thankfully her mom was there and could help translate, but this really affected me. I love doing outreach events, and being an educator in general, and it has become clear that not know Spanish has limited me. Not only that, but it limits the children found about some programs they were working on creating with Bell laboratories in increase minority participation, as well as a program initiated by Fred Young ( also known as Fred Begay and Clever Fox) with Los Alamos Laboratory help me practice and learn. This also made me think of how my younger sister is deaf, and I know ASL, but I have never gone out of my way to learn the signs to explain what I do in school to her. Partly because she has never been interested or asked, but still, I want to be ready when one day she does. I hope that by the next time someone asks me to explain how the universe works, I can respond in at least 3 different languages.

Monday I had another meeting with my mentor about the work I have in front of me for the next couple of weeks. I am working on developing a few more teaching guides and preparing to do a couple of Oral history interviews. I was researching a physicist name J.V. Martinez. He created the “Directory of Spanish Surnamed and Native Americans in Physics”, and in the course have found the files on the creation of the Committee on Minorities of APS. I have developed some interview questions for him, and in the process have uncovered some ..... interesting interactions to say the least. I have learned that the start of any committee is wrought with disagreements. people don’t get along, people don’t like who is in charge, and everyone thinks they can do it better. That being said, it was interesting to find that Martinez was the second chair of the Committee. I found about some programs they were working on creating with Bell laboratories in increase minority participation, as well as a program initiated by Fred Young ( also known as Fred Begay and Clever Fox) with Los Alamos Laboratory. Young, the first Navajo Ph.D. physicist, was working to create a training program with LANL and the local Navajo college to increase Native American participation in physics. Running through all these archives was the first really archival experience I have had in this internship and it has been very exciting. It is amazing how much detail you can learn about people from their letters. Who they like, who they didn’t like, what they wanted out of life, how they spoke. Every document had an important piece of information to share, even if when the author had no intention for it to be saved. Some of the letters are labeled confidential, which makes me feel almost like a spy, digging into the secrets of the past. I can see what plans were proposed, which worked and which didn’t, and why, Who was opposing this committee, who cared about it? I really have enjoyed learning more about the history of the American Physical Society and what made it into the organization it is today. What people did to make them care about women and minorities.

Wednesday We had our intern dinner with the CEO of SPS. We all had a great time and it was nice getting to catch up with people outside ACP about their internship work. Jesus and Daniel both seem to be enjoying their work and positions and it is interesting to see how their personalities seem to be tailored to the work they are doing. Nathan and I, while at ACP, don’t get a chance to talk to a lot. He recently published his first article in FYI about the NASA budget meeting in the Senate which was really exciting! We then shared baby pictures of ourselves for some reason, but it was really fun to see how everyone looked when they were young.

Thursday was very slow. I felt pretty sick, and still do, with a head cold, so getting work done was very difficult.

I am feeling a bit better today, and am hoping to get a teaching guide done about Wanda Diaz-Merced. I have talked about her a lot to the interns and think she is a truly inspirational person. I hope my lesson plan does her work justice. I am excited for Bridgette’s birthday which we are celebrating with a small party in the dorms.

We also got out SPS T-Shirts today with the spherical zoo on them, and they look really cute!

Week 5: Half way there

This week has been fun at work. I have been finishing up my teaching guide on Wanda Diaz-Merced, started a new one about Fred Begay, and received word from a possible interview candidate that they would like to meet with me!

I am really happy with the work I have put forward so far. I spent a long time working on the Wanda Diaz-Merced lesson plan. She is one of my inspirations in the field with her determination to never give up. I wanted to make sure o did her, and her story, and her work justice in this lesson guide. I think I have managed it. I even had some of the other interns come in and test our the activities I created for it and they found it very entertaining.

I was able to proudly attend the LGBT STEM day celebration knowing I had helped to contribute new materials for AIP that represented the community. The interns at ACP met up at the reception and discussed the development of our projects. It was actually quite helpful, as well as entertaining. Amanda showed us the prototype for the SOCK this year, and we got to mess around with it, but i also learned from Phoebe that she was working on an article about recent developments in nuclear fusion.

Fred Begay was the first Native American to receive a PhD degree in physics. He specialized in nuclear physics, specifically fusion! So I have requested permission from Phoebe and her mentors to use her article in my lesson plan, so the student scan not only earn about Fred Begay and his life and work, but the most recent developments in the field he worked in.

I do hope to finish Fred Begay’s lesson plan today, so next week I can focus on creating materials for the AAPT conference. I will be giving a 15 minute talk about the lesson plans AIP had about African-American inventors. So i need to go through our guides and pick out our lesson plans and create a presentations and script and practice.

Lots of work to do, and it is all very exciting but I should get back to it!

Travels and Directions

Life is a journey. You wake up one day, thrown into the world without any idea where you’re going, but an innate desire to get there. We spend our whole lives trying to decide where we want to go, where we hope to go, and asking others for directions when they themselves have rarely reached their destinations. We stumble and fall, and often get lost. All on a quest for that moment where we look around at our lives and may relax and say “I made it”.

Everyone’s destination is different. It is part of what makes us, well, us. Our final destinations are tailored to who we are as people and what will make us feel the most fulfilled and content. No one else knows where we are going or how to get there any more than we do, so we stumble along life, effectively blind, trying new things and feeling our way around a dark room, unable to see there is only one clear path out. No one has directions. Eventually, we hope to get there.

In my life, I have struggled with many things, one of which, is what I wanted to do in my future. I started making money in childcare when I was young, and never stopped. Throughout my studies in school and college, in between research and school clubs, I have always worked with kids. As i got older My babysitting morphed into volunteering to teach in my church, and then again to working in outreach programs in physics and astronomy. But it has always been just that. Something I did in between. I have had a clear goal of being a “physicist” for a long time, and working in research. Continuing on grad school and perhaps being a professor. It was, and is, a struggle for me. I get stressed easily and have a difficult time taking exams without cracking under pressure. I am much better with my hands and learning at my own pace outside of the classroom. I alway treated my diversity work as something i did to relax me from my academic stresses. Nothing more.

Physics can be a biased field, and to its credit it acknowledges this. Many students never get the chance to visualize what our lives might be like in anything but an academic research job. Some, if we are lucky, get exposure to national laboratories or industry research positions. But what about the other 60% of people with physics bachelor degrees that don’t go on to grad school? What do they do? Ands how well are they living?

This past week our group went to a tour at OSA and participated in a resume and career building workshop. Danielle Weiland, the SPS Education Programs coordinator, formatted the workshop to focus on these positions. She spent the time to hand pic jobs she thought each of us interns would like on our interests and personalities. She gave us the job descriptions of the positions and their salary. Most of us were pleasantly surprised they were all jobs we currently, or would qualify for with a bachelor of science.

I received a project manager position title at NASa to practice applying for. I have received these positions before and it had always thrown me off. Part of me inherently feels that teaching is a calling in some way, and working on outreach and education programs is something I work on in my free time constantly. I even love what I am doing here at AIP, creating teaching materials for high school teachers about women and minorities in physics. I would be perfectly happy continuing in this job for the rest of my life. But, I was always deterred by the income level. My family gave up a lot for me to go to school and have a better life, and I didn’t want to disappoint them or make their sacrifices lass meaningful by getting a lower paying job, and struggling the same way they did. It has been an internal struggle for me, battling between what felt like a calling, and what appeared to be the most practical.

But as I looked at this paper on my desk, with a real job currently posted on the USA job site, it described exactly what I wanted to do with my life, required only a BS, and paid over 6 figures.

Suddenly, I saw clearly the next steps I was supposed to take.

I talked to Danielle more and found these jobs are open frequently, and I wouldn’t be missing out on this one because I had a year left in school. I debated and warred with myself this past week, finally coming to the conclusion: I don’t want to go to graduate school. I don’t want to force myself through years of guaranteed stress in academia when I can do what I love now. Going into Project management and diversity programs does not require a PhD, and getting one wouldn’t help me. Working hard here at the rest of my internship and in my SPS chapter the next few months will.

I won’t lie, and say I magically know where my destination is, where I am meant to be going. But, I am breathing a little easier now. I have a few of the next directions.

Week 7

This week has gone a lot slower than the past few. The intern group hasn’t had anything planned particularly, but that doesn;t mean we haven’t gotten things done!

This week I spent working on editing my teaching guides. The intros of them didn’t flow very well. Katie, a graduate student here waiting to defend her defence, is helping me make them flow like a story better. I have learned a lot about flow and grammar. I am not particularly good at it, but I am learing.

We had the AIP chatters picnic, a monthly community building a check in event the organization hosts. The interns were all asked to give short presentations about our progress. I was really proud to be able to talk about my work and express my gratitude for all the different experiences I have had working here. I have been able to see some amazing places, like the capital and the Optical Society of America. I have been able to learn about wonderful people who did making things in history and tell their stories. because I live close by there is a chance I could even continue working on some of the projects I have started and wont be able to finish before the end of the summer. I may be able to conduct some of my own oral history of Physics interviews!

I am also preparing for the workshops i am helping out with at the American Association of Physics teachers conference next weekend. I am so excited to be a part of it and even go, i love conferences, but now I actually will be a part of it! a lot of the other interns are going to the conference as well, but I am not sure they will be able to stop by my workshops. I am speaking at one about the teaching guides we have available about African-American inventors throughout history. Sunday I will be helping Greg Good give a workshop on the teaching guides as well, and helping teachers understand the resources I have worked on all summer.

We also have 2 tours planned next week at NIST and NASA. I am also going to be helping out with the local Summer Girls Summer Camp program at UMD on thursday, speaking on a panel.

Oh before I forget about all the awesome opportunities I have had, Bridgette invited a few of us to a Women in STEAm festival ion the hill the other day, and it was great networking! I met soe people from NSF who are helping me apply to the pathway program. They told me that they can help me get a job working in diversity there and the pathways program. The woman there said joining the pathway program is the best way to get a long-term job at NSF. I got a t-shirt and a tote bag and coloring book and a way to get a job! pretty good day if i say so myself!

all the best, see you next week!

Preparing for Depature

This past week has been a testament to how much I am going to miss working here.

In the last week so much has happened, it is hard to believe. We went on a tour of NASA and NIST. I also spoke at a high school summer camp on Thursday. My mentor took our whole team out to lunch at Busboys and Poets to commemorate the departure of a grad student. Even on Monday I went to a party with some of my friends from school and Wednesday some of the girls and I went out.

I have worked on finalizing my teaching guides and preparing for the AAPT conference this weekend and next week. I picked out teaching guided to use from the website and printed them up for the work shop Greg and I are running. I practiced my presentation for the panel on African-American Inventors throughout history. I am really excited to help and present what I have done. Micheal was even able to make our games look nicer, with a card backing like none other. Those will also get posted to the site by the end of my time here.

In the past few days it has really started to sink in that my time here is ending. We have had meetings to talk about how the internship went over all. And have invited people to our symposium the last day we are here. I invited some mentors from school. Even some of the office workers have made comments that they are sad I am leaving soon, and are encouraging me to apply again next year. I plan to. I hope I get it, but if i don’t I know the next intern will have an amazing time here. I certainly have. This past week has been filled with all of the things I want out of my adult life: being involved in science, helping push the boundaries of diversity and education in the field, and hanging out with my friends. This internship has given me the chance to experience what living my adult life can be.

So starting tomorrow is the AAPT conference. I will be going to as much as I can, though I do need to rest. I will be helping with a workshop Sunday from NSF at an event they are doing, and a smaller one at the conference Monday. Amanda will be giving a talk on out reach materials and such Tuesday and I am excited to go to that, both for the content and to support her. I will also have to get my abstract finalized by Tuesday and begin working on my Symposium presentation. The end is going to be here before we know it.

Presentations, Conferences, and Farewells

This week was the American Association of Physics teachers conference in DC. Greg and I presented at 3 different talks, 2 of which were at the eAlliance summit. The eAlliance summit is a collection of female faculty who created peer mentoring groups for support and meet each year to discuss planning and organization at the AAPT meeting. Seeing them discussing their program and their lives was so heartwarming, and made me miss my own cohort of female scientists back at home. These groups were funded and coordinated by NSF. I am very thankful to have enough female’s in my major at the University of Maryland that our group could grow more organically and turn into the amazing support system it is today. Though to be honest, most of the organization was done by my friend Alison Duck. She is an amazing female astrophysicist who is currently working in Thailand over the summer and one of the best people I know. She should work with NSF building peer mentoring groups (if she wants to) she would be amazing at it.

People loved my presentations! Greg and I were talking about the teaching guide project and what resources we had developed. I reviewed use of the website and how to use the teaching guides, and then they played the games we made. People were very impressed with my presentation skills it seems, because many of the people from the eAlliance summit made a point of coming to our other talk about the history of HBCUs a few days later. That presentation also went amazingly. It was nerve wracking and empowering to be speaking from a place of authority at such prestigious conference. Greg seemed really proud of me, though he hasn’t told me directly yet. In our last presentation he made a mention to the audience of how happy he was that I live nearby and hopes i continue to work with him. When I came back to work yesterday, everyone mentioned how Greg had told them I did a wonderful job presenting at the conference.

I bumped into people I knew from the Access Assembly Network throughout the week, and they made sure to come by my talk too! The Access Assembly Network is another group I am a part of and went to the conference for in May. They focus on diversity issues in STEM. They are all so nice and it was amazing to see them all here. We got dinner together Tuesday and caught up.

It was amazing to see everyone at the conference honestly. Since deciding not to go to grad school for traditional science research, I have had a hard time conceptualizing my place in physics and where I fit in. But it seems to have been really good timing, because going to this conference was exactly what I needed. This conference was filled with people who had the same passions as me, but they were full time passions, not side projects in their free time. People who were dedicated to increasing diversity in the field, plenary speaker talks about educational reform, the acknowledgment of how society builds our heteronormative patriarchal world view of things in every talk, and how to fix it! There was an entire room dedicated to lecture demonstrations and new advancements in them. I even bought a telescope for $20! I met so many people who were incredibly encouraging about me moving into this field. I have received so many suggestions on next steps it is incredible. I learned about new organizations like the National Science Teacher Association, and the Knowles teaching Fellowship. I literally spent this entire morning emailing all the people I met and following up with the opportunities they made for me. Yesterday I did nothing but edit my resume.

At first I felt bad taking so long to edit my resume at work, but my coworkers and mentors were all very excited and happy to help! Katie especially took the time to walk me through every part of a good resume, helping me design the format, pick fonts and highlight the things that would be the most important in diversity jobs. The people here are AIP are all so nurturing. Even though I felt slightly guilty, Katie kept reminding me that things like building a solid resume are a part of an internship. Stephanie promised I would leave here with the best resume they could offer me. I still have to send it out for final review to Stephanie and Amanda (Aip employees not myself and Amanda the intern, though she is amazing too). The people here at AIP really took me in and treated me as one of their own. The encouragement to take care of myself as needed, including taking a day off after working 10-12 hours days at AAPT, and helping me prepare for my next steps, making it clear they are both proud of my progress, and sad to see me go.

It is starting to hit me harder each day how little time I have left working here. James emailed us today with updates on our final presentations and schedules. He said he is collecting out ACP badges on Thursday. In 6 days. We are leaving in 7. Moving out in 8.

I am truly blessed to have been here and all the help I have received, all the growing I’ve done.

I have 6 days left. Gonna make the most of it.

Who ever thought I’d be happy to go back to work, and sad to leave!

Farewell and Good Bye

I am not sure if I can properly encapsulate the intern experience I had here. I feel so blessed to have had this opportunity and to be able to learn so much, and to meet such incredibly wonderful people.

I learned all about historical research and some of the amazing ways the hard and social sciences interact with each other. Being able to develop my own teaching materials and work in education and outreach have me the information I needed to decide this is what I want my career to be. I changed my plans for my senior year to better reflect the skills I will need to continue in this field, and have started using the contacts I gained at ACP to network further job opportunities.

I learned about absolutely amazing historical figures and how they impacted physics today. My final published teaching guides explained Luis Alvarez, Victor Blanco, Alan Turing, Sally Ride, Fred Begay, and Wanda Diaz-Merced. These people had such interesting lives and meaningful work, I feel incredibly grateful to have spent the summer not only learning about them, but sharing their stories with the world.

I met incredible people too. The interns and my mentors all made this experience more than worthwhile and impactful for me. Greg Good is the best mentor I could have asked for. He is kind and understanding of the time I needed to learn the work, and needed to myself. He was always willing to talk to me about things outside of internship, from life advice, to retirement planning, to where to buy the best fountain pens in DC. I look forward to continue working with him over the coming year. My roommates were wonderful to live with, which was a big deal since I have never lived with people besides my family before. I loved the community we built together. How people would flow in and out of each other’s flats asking for ingre to make food, join in on movie nights, or just to say hi cause we were bored. Though we were hardly ever bored with all of the amazing things to do in the DC area. We went out to the monuments, girls nights and restaurants, Capitol Hill, the library of Congress, the University of Maryland’s Campus and more. I learned wonderful things about vegan cooking from Jesus and Elon, had wonderful bonding experiences with Phoebe and Bridgette throughout the summer, nerded out about Avatar the last Airbender with Krystina and gaming with Daniel, and made wonderful friendships with the rest of the crew. I can’t wait for the wonderful things to come in all of our lives. New jobs, babies and families, moving places. We have already mentioned we want to try and have a reunion in a few years.

All in all, I got everything I wanted from this internship and more. I got the experience of working in diversity and education, working in an office setting, traveling to wonderful places all around DC, and meeting so many people I can now call my close friends.

To those considering this internship program in the coming years. Do it. It is so worth it. You will get more than you could ever think to ask for.