Giavanna Jadick, 2019 AIP Mather Policy Intern: US House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology

Biography

SPS Chapter: Duke University

I am originally from Tampa, Florida and am now a rising senior at Duke University, with a double major in Physics and Political Science. After graduating, I plan to attend law school and work towards a career combining the sciences and legal issues. I am passionate about solving complex problems and finding novel ways to clearly explain scientific concepts, so I’m truly thrilled to be working on science policy this summer! Last year, I had the chance to work on climate policy at a think tank in D.C., where I used my physics background on a project coding Bayesian belief nets in Python to be used as tools for policy makers.

At Duke, one of my favorite activities is teaching physics. I am able to do this through community outreach at schools around Durham and by working as a physics lab teaching assistant. This past spring, I developed and taught my own course called “Physics for Everyone” which explored issues of accessibility in the sciences. As president of Duke’s SPS chapter, I am also able to launch many of my own initiatives to improve our physics community. On top of that, I love music (especially jazz!) and play saxophone in Duke’s pep band. I enjoy fixing and tinkering with instruments, so you can always pick me out of the crowd at basketball games by looking for the musician with blue tape on her saxophone. I am fascinated by the science of music, and next year, I will be doing physics research on the acoustics of saxophone mouthpieces.

In my free time (when I have any), I enjoy long runs, rock climbing, and good books—three of the best ways to keep challenging myself.

Internship

Host: U.S. House of Representatives

Project

Abstract

In the U.S. House of Representatives, the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology regularly invites prominent scientists and agency officials to share their work and statistical findings with Members of Congress. Data is at the epicenter of the Science Committee, leading to a remarkable amount of bipartisan action in an era defined by political gridlock and Twitter feuds. Yet, agreement tends to be drowned out by partisan cacophony, and much of this policy-driving data is hidden to the average citizen. Beyond these numbers, Capitol Hill is home to other “hidden figures” as well. From Metro travel times to the demography of policy briefings, this presentation will both look broadly at how data influences the legislative process and take a deeper dive into some of the unconventional statistics of Capitol Hill.

Final Presentation

Internship Blog

Week One: Setting Goals

This summer, I am one of the AIP Mather Public Policy Interns. The purpose of the internship is to get physics students involved in the policymaking process up on Capitol Hill. I have always been interested in both politics and physics, and I am always thrilled to find ways to combine the two! My placement is in the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology (or for short, the Science Committee). The main role of a congressional committee is to gather information on specific issues in order to better inform developing legislation. This involves hearings, markups, and a lot of research. During hearings, congressional representatives on the committee gather to hear from witnesses, and during markups, the representatives use their new knowledge to revise standing legislation. The Science Committee investigates issues broadly ranging from space and aeronautics to energy and the environment.

This week, Congress is out of session, which means there is not much work for me to pick up. My tasks have been mostly administrative—answering phone calls, making copies, and formatting letters. Fortunately, this has given me ample time to get to know some of my coworkers and become better acquainted with the office. I attended a lecture on new measures to recover from hurricane season, something both personally interesting to me as a coastal Floridian native and important to the Subcommittee on Environment. I have also started learning how to navigate the underground tunnels linking all the Congressional office buildings. Next week, when Congress is back in session, things will likely ramp up and there will be a lot of work for the interns to do. I’m excited to help out with the hearings and learn more about the policymaking process firsthand!

One of the particularly cool elements of this internship is the potential to develop an independent project. I was chatting with Jen Greenamoyer about the “whispering gallery” found in Statuary Hall of the Capitol Building, a spot where the curvature of the archways causes sound to be carried in a surprising way and allow two people standing on opposite ends of a room to have a conversation without difficulty. She suggested projects could be as technical as even be investigating the physics of this acoustics mystery! If I can figure out how to take some recordings in Statuary Hall (a task which requires clearing out masses of tourists), I will definitely investigate it.

For now, my goals for the summer are twofold. First, I want to watch and learn from the physicists in the Science Committee who are using their technical background to make change in the policy world. From the folks I have talked to, it is not uncommon to have a Masters or PhD in a technical field like chemistry, engineering, or even physics! This seems to be one of the unique elements of the staffers here and renews my hope that real science can influence national policy. Hopefully, I will glean some professional insight and be able to make my technical background useful, too! Secondly, I want to get to know my fellow SPS interns. This summer presents an awesome and unusual chance to live with so many other physics students all in one place.

All in all, I have a lot to learn, and I am excited to get started!

Congress In Session

This week Congress was back in session, and it certainly got busy very quickly! On top of usual intern tasks, I attended my first hearings, toured NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, went to several special events on the Hill, and started tackling more of my individual projects.

On Monday, Representative Kendra Horn (Chairwoman of the Subcommittee on Space & Aeronautics) went to tour Goddard with a small group of staffers. As the physics intern, I am particularly interested in space issues, so they invited me along as well! It was an amazing experience learning more about NASA’s mission and seeing some of the awesome projects they have going on at Goddard. After an overview presentation, we took a bus over to the facility where they work on the James Webb Space Telescope. I was shocked to walk in and see John Mather, ready to describe the telescope specs to Representative Horn! Afterwards, I introduced myself to Dr. Mather, and we chatted a little about how exciting it is to be here for the summer, working with the Science Committee (thanks to him). I had to run off to keep up with the tour, but I hope we get the chance to talk more substantially later on.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, the Science Committee hosted our hearings for the week: “Ocean Exploration: Diving to New Depths and Discoveries” and “Nature in Crisis: Biodiversity Loss and its Causes.” I helped out by snapping pictures of the members and taking care of their nameplates, so I was able to attend both hearings in full. I was also thrilled to see Representative Charlie Crist at the Ocean Exploration hearing, who represents St. Petersburg—part of the Tampa Bay area, right next to my home district. As the summer progresses, I hope to ask him more about how the issues we tackle on the Science Committee are specifically relevant to us Floridians. On top of that, Sammi (the FYI Science Policy Communications Intern) stopped by to attend the hearing, too! It was fun to show her some of the things I have learned in my brief time on Capitol Hill and get lunch together afterwards.

On Thursday, the Science Committee hosted our “Ocean Expo” as part of Capitol Hill Ocean Week, and I learned a ton about the ocean. During the hearings this week, a few of the witnesses brought videos to add color (literally!) to their testimony. I found the pictures to be incredibly impactful. When I imagine the ocean, I typically think of sprawling blue expanses—certainly beautiful in their own right—but I had no idea what I didn’t yet comprehend about the vivid worlds hidden at the ocean’s depths. A couple of the witnesses stuck around in D.C. for an extra day to showcase their research at the Ocean Expo, so I had the unique chance to talk personally with them about their work. One of the big questions everyone seems to ask is: How do we get more people to care about saving the oceans? From my personal observations, it seems like the scientists and politicians have primarily addressed this issue with scary statistics on how rapidly sea temperatures could rise or coral reefs might disappear, but I have found the most meaningful inspiration to be in the individual stories—from the delight of scientists discovering colorful corals to the enthusiasm of entrepreneurs building underwater remotely-operated vehicles to explore the unknown deep-sea. I might have to do some exploration of my own when I go back to Tampa at the end of the summer.

I have felt fairly busy at the office all this week, through a combination of formal tasks and projects of my own design. I have two main ideas to continue pursuing over the summer. First, I’m hoping to connect other SPS interns with their local representatives in Congress. Hearing from the witnesses and learning about the technical backgrounds of many of our staffers has reminded me of the importance of getting scientists involved in policymaking. My hope is that this will be valuable to the other SPS interns as both a way to learn more about politics and to better inform their own representatives. I certainly hope a group of young physicists can make a compelling case for their beliefs. This would also be an exciting chance to connect with politicians from other offices that are not affiliated with the Science Committee, including my own representative from Tampa, Congresswoman Kathy Castor. My second project is regarding the acoustics of Statuary Hall. Since arriving, I have had time to think through the project details more extensively. The propagation of sound waves is extremely complex, and there are so many options to consider when approaching room acoustics analyses. The potential to undertake a project analyzing the whisper spot in Statuary Hall has given me ample reason to read up on acoustics research and measurement methodologies during all of my free time this week, which has been a fun way to continue exercising my technical knowledge. Next week, my blog post will be more about the details of these projects! Stay tuned.

The Set of the Sails (or alternatively titled, The Clock is a Timer)

With the summer flying by faster than I can fathom, I find myself thinking about the many ways we wander through spacetime. We walk, we drive, we fly. We cram onto the Metro’s 7000-series trains, squeezing between besuited teenagers and befuddled tourists to the cheerful chime of “Please stand clear of the closing doors.” We make choices, and we grow older. But in the midst of all this motion, I don’t really feel like I’m moving. I stand up and sit down and move my limbs in different ways, but through it all, it’s as if I remain still and the whole world moves about me. The clock ticks away. Is it a stopwatch or a timer?

I love working on Capitol Hill. Being an intern in the Science Committee essentially means my job is to learn—one of my favorite activities! We had two more hearings this week, on “Exploring NASA’s Science Mission” and “Combating Sexual Harassment in Science.” The NASA hearing was awesome—normally I am assigned a specific task to do, like taking pictures or handling the representatives’ nameplates, but this time the other interns handled those things. I got to focus specifically on listening and absorbing all of the information on the newest space exploration missions and what their implications will be for policymakers. This was the most technical hearing I have been to yet, and it was pretty sweet to watch politicians learn more science right in front of my eyes!

I also took notes for staffers on a plethora of science and engineering events, including two hearings from other Congressional Committees. My favorite was by the House Intelligence Committee on the growing use of deepfakes and artificial intelligence. My interest was particularly piqued by one of the witnesses, a law professor who gave engaging testimony regarding the legal implications of using manipulated media as a form of malicious speech. I was struck by how clearly she was able to outline her proposal for a specific policy initiative to help with the problem and how strongly she stood her ground when pressed by one of the representatives during his questioning. Working on the Hill, I frequently see people doing cool things like this, whether it be in policy or in physics, but every time I do, I feel their gravity pulling my life plans in a new direction. Not only is summer flying by, so is the coming school year, and graduation is right around the corner. Tick tock, says the clock.

An aside on motion: people are like bosons, and cars are like fermions. We move about freely, darting through bustling crowds and ambitiously squeezing into overloaded Metro cars (see here ). But, automobiles are slaves to their narrowly-defined grids, unable to pass any obstacle without a clearly defined alternative path. Birds and airplanes take this problem and solve it by adding motion in a third dimension . Where your typical automobile might get stuck, the plane may zip above the others competing for the same space. I can’t stop thinking about flying. This week, the SPS interns embarked on a dinner cruise along the beautiful Potomac River, but my eyes were glued to the sky, watching planes taxi and birds soar. How can I glide? I’ve been reading David McCullough’s biography of the Wright brothers, and I came across this nicely topical poem between the chapters:

The Winds of Fate

“One ship drives east and another drives west
With the self-same winds that blow;
‘Tis the set of the sails
And not the gales
That tells them the way to go.”

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Spacetime flies around me, and I face a familiar intersection at Policy Street and Science Avenue. But this view is sadly two dimensional—why be forced to choose between x and y when z is a perfectly valid choice, too? I may be stationary as the timer ticks away, one week at a time, but that doesn’t mean I’m not moving. I stand on the rising escalator in the hidden tunnels beneath the Capitol, and the white walls warp away behind me and I ascend into a new space. I listen to a speaker at some event; air particles drum against the tympanic membrane of my ear, electrical impulses dash through my brain, and my vocal chords ring with the first words of a question. I adjust my sails and take in the wind.

Until next week,

Rock the Boat!

Surprise, I’ve figured everything out! Behold, my dear reader. I’ve acquired my crystal ball, and I’ve seen the future—I’m going to be a Boat Rocker.

Okay, so maybe I exaggerated a little. “Boat Rocker” isn’t necessarily the best defined future profession. But my aspirations are starting to crystalize, insofar as I am becoming more comfortable with working towards realizing my own goals without fitting into predefined boxes so much. At one event this week, while asking a question, I mentioned that although I am a physics student, I crave practical outlets for my vastly theoretical scientific knowledge. One panelist jokingly suggested I become an engineer (that got a good laugh). But, another attendee, a retired aerospace engineer, had a more serious idea. He pulled me aside and we chatted for a while about how to identify your own niche and use your unique talents to excel in life. He told me, “Whatever you do, rock the boat!” I like the idea of being a Boat Rocker. After all, I am a very independent person; I have many new ideas for projects just waiting to be pursued. Time to set the ball rolling.

Boat Rocker Rule #1: Be your own person.

In the spirit of rocking the boat, I have decided that as a scientist, it is important that I start collecting more data on the things I do this summer. I have two ideas. Experiment one: gender ratios of panelists and question-askers during presentations. Being on the Hill, there are innumerable public talks and roundtables available for me to attend, and I have tried to take full advantage of this. A lot of the presentations are geared towards policy wonks, but I have been to my fair share of more technical talks, too. I have loved getting to hear from experts about the cutting-edge innovations in their fields, ranging broadly from nano-biosensors to artificial intelligence to nuclear cybersecurity. I’ve made it my goal to ask at least one question at every talk I attend (I encourage everyone to do this—it forces you to focus in on the hard content of each presentation and think about it critically). However, after I went to my first few science events, I started to notice that I was frequently among only a few women in the audience who chose to participate in the Q&As. Perhaps this has just been my own confirmation bias, noticing demographical peculiarities and exaggerating these outliers. Perhaps it’s something bigger. By the end of the summer, the numbers will tell.

Boat Rocker Rule #2: Ground your reality in facts.

Experiment two is less boat-rocking: my daily commute times. But hey, it’s another tab in my fun spreadsheet (“BIG_DATA.xlsx”). Maybe it will yield some interesting findings!

Another big thing this week was volunteering at Astronomy Night on the National Mall. It was an awesome chance to engage in some community outreach and learn some new demos! Outreach is one of my favorite things I do at Duke, and it has been one of the most meaningful opportunities I’ve had to teach physics. I love teaching and wish I could do more of it. Teaching is just another way to learn. I was not very familiar with the astronomy demonstrations, so I started the night off at the science trivia station. This was decently fun, teaching tricky little “did ya know” facts to bystanders willing to test their knowledge (would you have guessed there are one thousand times more trees on Earth than there are stars in the Milky Way? I wouldn’t have). But, by the end of the event, I found myself drawn to the variety of experimental setups. Optics and soundwaves and stars—oh my! I wanted to learn how each one worked, and by the end I was working a station explaining the life cycles of stars using balloons, tin foil, and tacks.

There is nothing like watching someone learn science, right in front of your eyes. My station attracted a lot of young kids (probably because of the balloons), little boys and girls alike. It was exciting to see everyone drawn to learn physics, no one shy to learn or fearful of their own inabilities. I have seen so many of my peers grow discouraged with physics, thinking they lack innate aptitude for more mathematical fields of sciences. It is well established that when people believe a field requires innate ability, the proportion of women and underrepresented minorities drops significantly . And yet, when we have less diversity in STEM fields, we also have less innovation and lower productivity . I have always felt very strongly about the importance of inclusivity, especially in physics, and volunteering reminded me of the work that still needs to be done. It also gave me hope for the future.

Boat Rocker Rule #3: Shape reality for the better.

The SPS intern team makes quite the group of budding Boat Rockers, immune to typical social incongruities. On Thursday, we watched Hidden Figures, a movie about the brilliant African-American women working at NASA in the 1960s, and on Friday, I heard from astronaut Major General Charles Bolden, Jr., on the commercialization of low-Earth orbit. On the other hand, on Saturday, while teaching kids about the fabric of the universe at Astronomy on the Mall, we were informed that according to the cosmic rules of our “celestial sphere,” apparently spacetime cannot bend, because pixels do not do that (hmm...) and on Sunday (does 1 AM count as Sunday or Saturday?), we watched Behind the Curve, a documentary about flat Earth conspiracy theorists. What other group could possibly be so bold and so unencumbered by dogma to yield themselves to such contradiction? I’m in good company.

Boat Rocker Rule #4: Engage with all views, from the sound to the suspect, and evaluate them for yourself.

Too much happens for me to cover everything I do in these blog posts, but I always want to try to share it all. Inspired by scientist turned chef extraordinaire, my fellow intern Joseph Tibbs, I’ll finish off this week with a rapid-fire rundown, in order of increasing magnitude: I got lost in the Capitol Hill tunnels exactly once, went on two runs by the waterfront, sat in a trolley with three congresspersons, ate four slices of homemade pizza, solved five crossword puzzles from the Washington Express, went to six events on the Hill, prepared eight hearing binders, watched eleven minutes of Cooks, wrote sixteen letters in purple pen, and—an innumerable number of times—explained how popped balloons coated in tin foil are actually neutron stars (it’s a metaphor).

Keep rocking the boat,

An Extended Metaphor

Running is an excellent activity by which one can explore their surroundings, hone their physical abilities, and overall, simply enjoy the beautiful outdoors. DC is a runner’s paradise, with its lovely parks, spectacular waterfronts, and epic monuments lining the national mall. The sun rises early enough in the morning to leave plenty of time for a refreshing morning jog, so I have taken to running in the city before work along with one of the other SPS interns. In an incredible juxtaposition to the natural marvels of Mother Earth, I have chosen to augment my appreciation of the outdoors by means of a smartphone app.

The app is quite handy. It records the routes of my morning runs on a map along with a healthy variety of other statistics, including my average speed, elevation change, and distance traveled. Perhaps soon I’ll have some more columns to add to my “BIG_DATA.xlsx” spreadsheet . If I want, I can even use the app to document how I felt during the run using a Likert scale, infallibly ranging from “sad face” to “happy face.” Who knew the secret to the mystery and depth of human emotion was hidden in the equation defining the parabola of an emoji’s smile? The genius of the smartphone!

Truly, the app is great. So far, in these early stages of using it, my favorite feature has been its special, congratulatory messages displayed when I set a new personal record. The other day, I took a particularly relaxed route along the Georgetown waterfront and decided to push myself to run faster than usual. I ran with sweet anticipation of the dopamine rush that would come with the animated streamers and cartoon trophy boasting “Your #1 fastest run!” Out of breath but satisfied at the end of my run, I was confident my speed had crushed my past records. I checked my phone. “Congratulations,” it read. “Your #3 longest run!”

It was my 3^rd time using the app. Cheeky.

Maybe I shouldn’t be so immediately dismissive of the funny quirks of free smartphone apps. I have quite the penchant for extended metaphor. In my mind, the contrast between my excitement for #1 pace and the app’s prioritization of #3 distance not only underscores a fundamental difference in values between me and my smartphone; it also parallels the difference in values between me and the universe. Jai Guru Deva, Om . Just because something is important and exciting to me does not mean it will have as powerful of ramifications for the rest of the world. Our experiments are the same, but we might be measuring distinct dependent variables.

This brings me back to a question which has been pressingly relevant to my academic career: How do I align what is important to me with what is important to society? The scales of my mind seem to be forever oscillating between work I deem invigorating and satisfying (physics, political philosophy, theory) and a need to take action which desirable and important (engineering, public policy, the practical). My fundamental need to have a tangible impact tangos with an insatiable craving to understand everything first.

I believe the two are not mutually exclusive. I see glimmers of hope in the little ironies of life here in Washington DC: going to a science trivia night for an evening of friendly whimsy and swapping business cards; filling the stoic rotunda of the Capitol Building with gleeful echoes of laughter from interns on a scavenger hunt; texting the director of the physics honor society with your order request for a bright blue bucket hat. Business in trivialities, joy in the serious. Plus, after all, my running app did display "#1 fastest run” in the fine print below "#3 longest.”

I knew my run had been my fastest before I even checked the app. There is no world in which my phone could have told me any meaningful information to change that knowledge; it could only dazzle my eyes with flashes of photons and a digital pat on the back. If I know my values are sound, and if I know I have succeeded in fulfilling my values, then no external validation should matter. Fulfilling these two axioms should complete my internal need for satisfaction. Now, it’s a matter of setting my own values where my #1 fastest matches up with my iPhone’s #1 longest, instead of #3. Values can overlap. Two vectors don’t necessarily form an orthonormal basis.

Maybe I’m reading into my new app too much. The irony of using technology to fully appreciate the nuances of reality is not lost on me. Or, maybe my iPhone is even smarter than I thought.

This week I decided to focus this blog post on running, not because it has taken up the majority of my time but because its metaphor has extended the farthest. I originally thought I could use these posts to document the everyday happenings of my internship, but my days are too crammed with detail to be appropriately reduced to mere summary—for snapshots of what I actually did this week, check out some of my pictures (I actually uploaded some this week!) I do feel a little scattered thanks to the sheer volume of stuff to do, but I’m not overwhelmed. Weekly themes unify the disparate. All hail the omniscient smartphone app! Here’s to checking our values.

The Un-Official Non-Comprehensive Guide to the Mather Internship

Yes, she lives! You may have noticed, I’ve been gone a little longer than usual since my last blog post. Never fear, some fluctuations from the median arrival rate are expected with any Poisson distribution. The length of time between my blog posts is inversely correlated with the amount of sleep I get, and things have sure been busy. In addition to my typical Science Committee workload, the SPS internship has some special events which the Mather Interns traditionally plan.

Since this blog post has already been derailed from its preordained post time, it might as well serve as a time capsule, detached from the chains of the clock altogether. So, I write this post to you, future Mather interns! I hope this post is of some help as you embark on your ten-week trek through Washington, DC. Special thanks to former Mather intern Sarah Monk and her blog posts and my fellow Science Committee intern Katie Prebelich for designing a beautiful itinerary, both of which were of great aid to me and certainly enhanced SPS’s time on Capitol Hill.

Without further ado, here is The Un-Official Non-Comprehensive Guide to Making the Most of the Mather Internship.

Your Site Placement

Usually, both Mather interns are placed somewhere on the Hill (although in characteristic iconoclast fashion, my co-Mather intern Nicholas is instead crushing it up at NIST this year). It is an experience unlike other public policy internships. Here’s the low-down.

• Introduce yourself to everyone in your office, and don’t be afraid to emphasize your physics background. If you’re the only intern with technical knowledge, you’re more likely to get more of the hard science work.
• Identify your specific science policy interests, and make sure your supervisor knows about them.
• Get involved in a focused research project as soon as you can.
• Be creative! Your project doesn’t necessarily have to be something someone else is doing. Feel free to make it your own.
• Connect with staffers who are researching the topics you like.
• The Hill has a bunch of events going on all the time. Don’t just go for free lunch (although that is nice). Go to learn new things about topical political issues and to meet people working on issues you’re passionate about.
• Give out business cards. Network. And send follow-up emails to everyone you meet!

The Fourth of July

You are in Washington DC, home of our federal government, and you are one of only a few policy interns in a group of physicists. Goody you! It is now your job to get all the other scientists excited about policy, too. One of the coolest ways to do this is by helping organize a fun, patriotic celebration on the 4^th of July.

• One DC classic is the annual “Capitol Fourth” concert on the National Mall. Your Capitol Hill ID gets you and as many guests as you want special access to seating on the steps of the Capitol. Bring everyone! I probably had close to two dozen people with me. Special shout-out to the policemen who watched me go back and forth to get more friends, twice.
• If you show up at 3pm, the Capitol seating will be empty. It’s an awesome view and maybe you’ll get to see some of the artists rehearse their sets. Make a picnic out of it!
• The steps of the Capitol have the best view in the house (no pun intended).
• After watching the fireworks on the Mall, the Metro will be flooded with tourists. Bring some walking shoes and enjoy a view of the White House on your way back to GW!

Tour of Capitol Hill

Each SPS intern is responsible for organizing a tour of his or her respective placement site. For the Mather intern, this is a great chance to talk more about the specific work you do and expose some physicists to the policy grind of Washington. There is plenty to do while on Capitol Hill!

• Try to organize group meetings with Congresspersons, and organize the tour date around whatever works best for the most offices. We met Rep. Bill Foster, the only PhD physicist in Congress. It was awesome; he talked with all of us for an hour!
• Tour the Capitol Building early in the morning so you can beat the mobs of middle schoolers.
• After you finish your planned meetings, don’t be afraid to just pop into Member’s offices. You never know—maybe your Congressperson will be hanging out on the couch, and you’ll get an impromptu half-hour meeting (props to Nicholas’s Congressman, Rep. Mike Simpson)
• Go by your site placements and show everyone around your office. If you have a committee room, it’s worth booking just to show off the beautiful space. Talk about your work and explain how Congress functions.
• But, don’t forget to remind everyone that they’re still in an office building.
• Show off your newly-developed skills navigating the rumored labyrinth of tunnels.
• Go to the Library of Congress and get a reader’s card. Think of documents you want to see! Trust me, you’ll wish you allotted more time to hang out there.
• Dress full business attire and represent SPS with those sharp lapel pins.

That’s all for this “week’s” post! Until next “time.”

There is Such Thing as a Free Lunch

In the Twilight Zone where policy interns thrive, the local currency is free Capitol Host sandwiches and black coffee. Didn’t RSVP? No worries! The event sponsors welcome you anyways (probably). Even if you have no interest in the subject matter whatsoever, that’s fine too—surely, the prominent speaker in whatever-their-field-is-anyways won’t mind the sound of you crunching on salt and vinegar chips in the front row, especially since you’re going to leave 20 minutes into the presentation anyways. Yet, I have come to observe that as satiated interns decide their eardrums have suffered long enough to justify their receipt of a lunchbox, the edges of the room always remain filled with wallflowers who arrived too late to claim a chair but want to stay and—shockingly—learn. Economists have a famous saying, “there’s no such thing as a free lunch,” but I imagine said economists have never heard of Capitol Host catering.

It has been very strange to observe the behavior of the other interns on Capitol Hill, a sentiment my fellow Mather intern Nicholas has similarly expressed . If I sound a little disenchanted, perhaps it is because I am, just a bit. I have never been anywhere else for a significant period of time with such a significant concentration of experts ranging across such a broad range of professions—it’s such a thrill! And yet, very few of the other people here seem to be expressing the same delight. Either they have become too accustomed to the atypical or they don’t seem to realize the gravity of some of the incredible speakers congregating in the Rayburn meeting rooms. It is bizarre to witness a greater correlation between attendance and free lunch availability (coupled with a dearth of other events serving free food at the same time) than with research impact.

A vignette: it is 12:50pm on a Friday, and you are in one of the ornate hearing rooms of the Longworth House Office Building. An event on auto insurance pricing and racial discrimination is about to start. A table of donuts and coffee sits out in the open—a feast for all who attend—but it is strategically hidden behind the door as it is propped open. Those clever event sponsors! You hear a group of people approach the door, chattering unabashedly loudly (the signature of a pack of under-caffeinated interns). A sleep-deprived teenager peaks his scruffy head around the corner, and his ravenous eyes dart about the room seeking sustenance. But, his prize is hidden behind the door. Not willing to enter the room (to sit through the event without a snack is parallel to fighting a dragon with a toothpick), he retreats to the sweet shelter of the staff café in the basement. Sadly, he doesn’t know he could even get a discount if only he walked one building over to the Library of Congress.

Okay, I’m being a little facetious. I’m truly lucky to have attended such a plethora of events this summer. I’ve learned a lot, and as I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been taking data, too . I’ve gotten to the part of my little “BIG_DATA.xlsx” side project where I have to start analyzing my data. But in chatting with one of the Research and Technology subcommittee staffers about my project, I’ve realized I’m not without my biases, either. For example, I mostly attend more technical talks because they interest me more than pure policy discussions. I also have mostly attended afternoon talks, because it is more convenient for me to leave the office during lunch hours. Biggest of all, I have to decide which words I am going to classify as “STEM"-like in order to analyze the text descriptions of the talks I have attended, and I haven’t yet thought up an objective way to generate this list. What does this all mean for my summer side projects?

I’ve concluded that my mini-analysis is not necessarilly a journal-worthy study, but it is certainly interesting and that’s worthwhile to me. Maybe if the results are interesting, another researcher will come along and launch a more serious investigation to look into the ramifications I hope to uncover. Still, I know it’s important to regularly stop and reflect on why I am approaching a problem in a particular manner, so I can assess whether I am taking the best course of action for my chosen degree of effort. I wish I had more time to do a more thorough analysis of my data, but somehow it is July 23^rd, and I have to finish a draft of my final presentation slides by the end of the week. Regardless, I’m really excited for our final presentations. For me, this summer has been one of taking initiative and looking for things to learn in unusual places. I can’t wait to see what the other SPS interns have been up to.

Going to all of these catered events this summer, I have decided there is certainly such thing as a free lunch. The typical economist might reply to my brazen claim with something along the lines of, “You can’t get something for nothing! Each intern who gets a free lunch must consider the opportunity cost of the time they spent traveling to the event, sitting and eating, then waiting to leave.” Well, economists, in that case, the people who go to events only for the free food are actually the ones paying the highest price. If someone goes to an event to learn and would have attended regardless of the status of the catering, what was the opportunity cost? For the curious and inquisitive, there does exist such thing as a free lunch.

Reflections from a Non-Inertial Reference Frame

Just the other week was the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, and a group of us interns went to watch a reenactment of the launch projected on the Washington Monument. We were clustered into a Metro car, as tightly packed as particles in a Bose-Einstein condensate, when to the thrill of all, someone produced a bouncy ball from their pocket. Being the experimentalists we are, we quickly constructed a makeshift accelerometer consisting of two SPS interns, a square meter of space, and the ball (maybe that can be next year’s SOCK). To our glee, the ball bounced up and down in perfectly straight lines while the train was moving at a constant speed. It wasn’t until the train pumped the brakes that its motion was disrupted, arcing into the stomach of the intern at the back of our “accelerometer.” It was fascinatingly disorienting to watch the ball disobey Newton’s laws right in front of my eyes-- probably because, this week, I’ve been that bouncy ball.

I don’t mean to say I’ve been bouncing off the walls (although as my fellow interns know, I’m always jazzed). Things are slowing down. Just last Monday, I was cruising down the highway of life at a peachy 75, sitting down for breakfast with John Mather and Bill Foster and grabbing coffee with the Science Committee chief of staff. Yet, Wednesday was my last day of work on Capitol Hill, this morning I gave my final presentation for the summer at ACP, and now I’m packing my bags and we’re rolling to a stop.

A non-inertial reference frame is any frame of referencing experiencing a nonzero acceleration. Classical laws of motion turn wonky. That’s certainly true right now-- I feel like we’ve been in DC for much longer than 10 weeks. It’s time to go home already? It’s pretty crazy, but the SPS internship experience has been awesome and one I would never have traded. It is impossible to articulate how much appreciate my fellow interns and everything I’ve learned from them this summer, but since I kicked off these blog posts by stating my goals, I feel obligated to try. There’s no better place for reflecting than a non-inertial reference frame!

My two goals for the summer were to learn from the staffers in the committee and to “get to know my fellow SPS interns.” Wow! Was there ever a time I didn’t know my fellow interns? Now, they’re some of my best friends. I want to take this obscure spot in the middle of this blog to thank a few special people in a really long run-on sentence. So, thanks to Nicholas for being his authentic self and saying things like “groovy” and inspiring me to have the confidence to put myself out there; thanks to Noura for living with me and being hilarious and teaching me anything from cool demos to the value of unabridged enthusiasm; thanks to Meg for the late night conversations about philosophy and thoughts on what it might be to live a meaningful life; thanks to Nolan for the early morning runs on the waterfront, the impromptu guitar jam sessions, the great book recommendations and the perfectly tempered optimism; thanks to Cate for talking about life and encouraging me to think empathetically and for going to Sunday yoga and also for going to Penn State; thanks to Sammi for being amazingly pumped about science activism and for asking me to get lunch with her the second week when I was way too shy to have reached out on my own; thanks to Jackie for helping me think more openly about the options we have in life, for inspiring me with her own research and approach to life, and also for being incredibly bright; thanks to Tibbs for his fantastic knowledge of the world, willingness to indulge my curiosities, infinite patience in explaining everything, and of course his awesome cooking; thanks to Eric for being furious but secretly one of the nicest people I’ve ever met and helping me learn more about people; thanks to Terry for being brilliant and awesome to talk to about anything, especially the random things like hidden history and especially about nuclear pasta; thanks to Jerry for scooping and beautiful prose and crosswords; thanks to Bells for being an artist who doesn’t let science get in the way of that; thanks to Amber for unbridled enthusiasm and beautiful goals; thanks to Andrew for pushing me to be precise; thanks to Sariah for being kind; thanks to Anna for being thought-provoking.

I came into this summer intending to go to law school and work on legal science issues after graduating, but being in the science committee has reminded me how much more I have to learn. I am a fundamentally curious person, and being thrown into an ocean of scientific ideas from all fields gave me an insatiable urge to understand everything. “Learning everything” isn’t exactly the most practical goal, but it reminded me of my core values-- knowledge and truth. So, I am going into my senior year hoping to figure out what I don’t yet know and prioritize the knowledge I want to gain moving forward in physics. Hopefully one day I’ll learn something no one else has, and I’ll use that to make some change for good. As of now, that probably means diving into some research and aiming for grad school, but I’m not committed to anything yet. I’m enjoying every moment!

Oops, I did the thing again. I got reflective and forgot to talk about the actual stuff I did this week. Never fear! My next post will be a comprehensive list of all the cool stuff I did this summer (with pictures!) Stay tuned, my dudes.