Sylphrena Kleinsasser, 2021 APS Career Programs Intern

Biography

SPS Chapter: Lycoming College

I am a rising junior at Lycoming College majoring in Physics and Chemistry with a minor in Computer Science. Since my first stargazing trip with our chapter, I knew I had found my home with SPS. I am heavily involved with my local SPS chapter and served as president this past academic year—I hope to continue my involvement throughout my time in academica. Outside of SPS, I am an resident assistant, math/subject tutor, student senator, and lab assistant.

My career plans are a work in progress, but I have found particular interest in the areas science where Physics and Chemistry overlap. I’m unsure what specific field I wish to pursue, but I hope to clarify my plans with research experience and future coursework. In my free time, I enjoy working with computers, skiing, and biking with friends.

Internship

Host: American Physical Society

Project

Abstract

Many undergraduates in physics see graduate school as the ultimate goal of their education. However, the majority of physics Bachelors find employment outside of academia. Physics training encompasses a diverse set of skills—physics degree holders at all levels are highly employable in the private and government sectors, which may require a different type of skill set than academia. To investigate this point, my work this summer has focused on extracting desirable skills based on sector and degree requirements from the data available to APS. Over the course of my internship, I developed a program to collect and process APS Job Board postings, exporting common keywords that may hold significance, based on a variety of factors. The board pools job postings in various job sectors from APS and partner societies, including Physics Today, SPS, AAPM, and IEEE Computing. In collaboration with my mentor, I took this data and found the most relevant keywords to analyze. In this presentation, I will explain my approach and present the results of the APS job board analysis.

Final Presentation

Internship Blog

Week 1: Introductions and Metadata

My internship had a great start this week! I thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to get to know my fellow interns and the awesome people at APS. We met with SPS staff on Tuesday for orientation. It was great to learn more about the organization and get some tips for the summer.

The other APS interns and I received a very warm welcome from APS staff and got our various onboarding work completed. I met with my mentor on Wednesday morning and I started work on my project that afternoon. I was very excited to meet everyone and begin my project! I didn’t get too far into my work this week, since I had a large quantity of meeting and personal commitments, but I made some progress into the initial workload and got a feel it.

On Thursday, we met with all the other SPS interns for a meet and greet over lunch with Dr. David Helfand, AIP Board Chair. His thoughts on science communication and misinformation was fascinating. Besides this meeting, I spent most of my day on my project—preprocessing data about job postings in physics to permit analytics further into the summer!

Friday was very busy, as I have some personal commitments and several events for my internship. I met with my mentor to check in on my project and received a better idea of my path forward. That evening, all of us interns met for a bad physics movie night. We had a great time watching and critiquing the logic in Antman and we had a great chat afterwards.

I’m super excited to move forward with my project and continue to make connections with my peers next week!

Cheers,

Week 2: Getting Settled

This week, I found myself settling into my internship much more. I unfortunately had to miss two of our internship events for personal reasons, but I was still very happy with my progress outside of that. I finished some initial data processing required for my data analysis of APS Career job posting this week and I am excited to start programing with mySQL and python and get into the meat of my work here. My mentor and I have set out a nice plan for the next few weeks that should keep me on track.

The other APS interns and I were invited to a birthday bash event with the organization and were introduced to everyone—we received a warm welcome and had the chance to get to know some of the people we will be working with these few months. We also attended a little virtual lunch with all the APS interns and supervisors. I thoroughly enjoyed getting to know them and I look forward to similar events in the future.

The next week should be eventful—aside from deviling further into my work, I will have several events with my peers at APS and the other SPS interns. I’m particularly excited for the SPS colloquium on Thursday! I’ll be sure to post an update in my next blog on it.

Cheers,

Week 3: Down to Buisness

Week three is in the books! This work week was a little shorter, as APS offices were closed for Juneteenth on Friday. I enjoyed a lunch with the APS Careers team on Thursday, followed by a fascinating virtual colloquium with SPS National President, Dr. Kiril Streletzky. He presented on his work on Undergraduate Research in Light Scattering Spectroscopy. I was particularly intricated by a portion of his talk which focused on potential applications of his work to pharmaceutical drug delivery.

I had a productive week with my project! I successfully setup my database software to process APS Job Postings and imported the data with the correct data validation rules. I ran into several bugs, but I have happily finished with importing the data. My next steps are to connect my database with python and build the processing program which will spit out my results. Unfortunately, I need to work out some network issues that have been preventing remote access to the database system. I hope to have that issue resolved early next week.

Next week, SPS interns will be meeting with Dr. John Mather for a round table. I am incredibly excited for this event, as I briefly met him after a talk at PhysCon 2019. I am also excited to join APS for a virtual pride event on Thursday!

Week 4: Squishing Bugs

This was another super busy week for me! I only had a few meetings for my internship this week, but I wanted to really start moving on my code. On Monday, I had the chance to have lunch with the other interns and department heads in APS. We had a nice chat and got to know each other and our projects.

I also elected to attend the APS company pride event, which was a very pleasant virtual meeting in gather town. This was my first chance to use this tool, so I was impressed by its capabilities. We shared some pictures of pride and had a game of pride trivia. It was great to see such a supportive environment fostered by APS.

On Friday, the SPS interns had a round table with Nobel Prize winning physicist, Dr. John Mather. He shared brief presentation summarizing the talks he typically gives and left tons of time for questions. I had the honor of meeting him after his presentation back in PhysCon 2019, so it was awesome to get the chance to ask him some questions. It was an awesome experience!

This week was also very exciting for my project! As it turned out, my code to import data to my database management system was very buggy, so I had to complete rewrite that module, this time in python. This took much of my week, but I spent the rest of my time on creating a GUI to manage and tie together my code. I’m super excited, as this is my first program with a proper GUI and it is looking great! I have a lot of work to do, but I’m very excited for the end project!

Cheers,

Week 5: More Bug Hunting!

This week felt a little slower, as I ran into a fair number of bugs in my project. I managed to finish a major module in my code and make great headway into another! I can now import job data into my program and perform basic searches. Next, I will enhance the searching capabilities and add functionality to find relevant terms that appear often in the job data. I need to finish one more after the current one, then I should be able to get going on analysis and start my analysis!

I had less meetings this week, but I did have the chance to join the monthly APS Careers department meeting for teambuilding and introductions. I had a fun time and I look forward to future meetings like that! I’m also very excited for next week, as the SPS Interns will be attending a virtual 4^th of July Picnic on Thursday!

I also got materials for the SPS Physics Demonstration contest, so I am very excited to start working on that project. I’m hoping my idea will work out as I plan, but I have some backups if there are any issues!

Cheers,

Week 6: Progress!

This week was a busy one! We are getting to crunch time, but I feel somewhat on track with my project. I’m very excited, as I have finished the backbone of code for my project. I’m not sure if I have explained the purpose of the application I am building on this blog—basically, it will process data from physics job postings and search with specified keywords based on different criteria, such as job sector or permeance. Additionally, I have made a module to find the most common relevant terms in the data, to be send back for analysis. All of this will be packaged in a intutive GUI for use beyond this internship.

I simply need to connect them together, add some documentation and frontend features, and the app development portion of my project should be complete. Will any luck, I can start initial analysis of the data this week.

Besides working on my project, I had the great pleasure of joining the other interns and several mentors for a virtual picnic with Former United States Representative Rush Holt! After a fascinating talk, we asked him some questions regarding science in relation to government policy, then we moved on to Jackbox games and chatting. It was overall a great experience and a great honor to meet Rep. Holt.

Cheers,

Week 7: Improvements and Intermittent Interruptions

This week, I finished my data processing application. I’m very excited, as I found an alternative database system that greatly speeds up queries and is much easier to package into a portable application! It can now perform all the functions we had originally planned to commit, but I want to make a number of modifications to expand capabilities and reduce risk of user error. These are low priority as I start my analysis, but I will work on this on the side.

Since the application can now perform the work required for my analysis, I started to work with that data this week. My advisor and I used the data processing application to obtain the most common words in all APS job postings to date and selected the most interesting to analysis. We will use this data to find relevant trends and relationships within job postings.

Unfortunately, I have been having power outages in my area and was interrupted mid-meeting twice this week. I have had five outages in the past month! Hopefully, these storms will pass and leave me to my work!

This was another week with minimal meetings, but I met with Crystal Bailey, the head of the APS Careers Programs, to show her my progress. I also join the other SPS interns at a resume workshop. Both were a great time!

Cheers,

Week 8: Documentation and Experimentation

Since I finished my program according to our original goals last week, I started work on my analysis this week. My advisor and I are considering the best way to present our findings visually. I have created excel functions to calculate relevant of keywords based on the total quantity of listings by each filter. This will help us with some visualizations and I also made some graphs with this data. In addition, I am experimenting with word clouds and pie charts as potential representations of results.

This week was very light on meetings. Our SPS intern colloquium had to be postponed, so I simply had some check-ins and my word. I spent a day or two improving and simplifying my code as I added proper documentation. This allowed me to add some important functionality and expose certain parts of the code for easy maintenance. I hope I will have time to return and add more features. Now that I cleaned it up and reduced redundancy, the only essential programming steps that remain are to properly package the program and manage installing dependencies. I will return to this task after I have a chance to get more progress on my results!

Cheers,

Week 9: Analyses

It’s hard to believe how fast time has flown—I will be presenting my results next week! I spent this week working on my presentation and analyzing my data. I still need to add one more visualization of my results, but otherwise the slides are all done! Much like the beginning of my internship, I am spending a good amount of time working in google sheets, manipulating all our results to get interesting graphs. I enjoy working with sheets—especially with more advanced formulas, it holds many of the appeals that programing has for me. After I finish my charts and word clouds, I will work on my speaker notes and practicing my talk. I still need to return to my program to properly package it, but I may have to table that until I have my presentation ready and practiced. I did not work on code this week, except a quick bugfix in my SQL syntax.

I unfortunately had to miss the SPS Intern Colloquium this Thursday for personal reasons, but I had the great pleasure of speaking with Callie Pruett, the Senior Strategist for Grassroots Advocacy at APS. I am interested in science policy and activism, so I had asked Midhat to setup a chat with Callie. It was great to hear a bit about her work at APS and her path to her position at APS.

Next week will be very busy, as I will be on a panel for the AAPT Conference this Tuesday, in addition to final internship responsibilities and my presentation on Friday. It’ll be lots of fun, but I have my work cut out!

Cheers,

Week 10: Wrapup

It’s really hard to believe my time as a SPS intern is over. This past week was jammed packed with final preparations, practice, last minute documentation, and final meetings. I’m truly sad to see my internship come to a close, but all good things must end. I was very pleased with how my presentation turned out—I was a little worried, as I only had an outline at the end of last week. However, I think it really came together after I added all my result visualizations, and tuned my talk with input from peers and mentors. I also finished some final points with my program early this week, mainly compiling and packaging the code into a contained windows MSI executable, compiling for mac, fixing final bugs, final documentation, and making setup scripts for future development. It truly was the busiest week of my summer!

I cannot express enough gratitude for everyone involved in making my summer what it was—but I especially appreciate all the support and hard work from my mentor, Midhat Farooq, and all the folks at APS. Our check-ins were always encouraging and she kept me on track this summer. I felt welcomed and included throughout my time at APS. This project and the people involved have shed some light on the type of work I wish to pursue in the future. I would be honored to find myself in a workspace such as this once I have completed my academic path.

Additionally, I want to express my sincere thanks to all those at AIP who pulled everything together—Brad Conrad, Kayla Stephens, Kayla Stephens, Marshall Ott, and everyone else behind the scenes. Thank you to all of my fellow interns for their awesomeness, I will miss our Monday hangouts. This project was an absolute blast, and the company was unrivaled. It was a great pleasure to work with all of you, and I look forward to meeting at PhysCon and/or the SPS National Council meeting this spring.

Cheers,