Chelsea DeSouza's blog

I have now finished my powerpoint and have refined it several times, and am waiting to give my presentation. I am a little bit more nervous about this presentation than I am about the last one. This presentation feels so final. I am lucky though because my presentation is on Thursday so I don't have to wait too long.

These weeks seem to go by faster and faster. I can't believe that I will be done with my project in one week from now. I also am very nervous about finishing everything on time.

We haven't finished writing the density program for Matlab, so I will have to spend some time on that next week.

We also revamped the density equation that we are using and found some of the basic assumptions that we need to make to get a one to one relationship between floc density and floc Diameter.

I can't believe that week 8 has already come and gone. This week was really the most indicative of my readiness/willingness to go straight on to Grad school. I know that at grad school, you have to be much more of a self-directed learner and I am not really ready for that yet. I do hope to go on to grad school, but at a time where feeling completely lost every day does not seem so daunting.

This week has been focused solely on finding the clearest graphical interpretation of the data that we have so far. I had to compare the Light scattering data to tides, salinity, nitrate levels, and temperature. Unfortunately, the time stamp of the data sets did not have the same format so I had to manually insert one. Below is one of my super awesome graphs.

   I am starting to truly comprehend how short my time is here at this internship.  I cannot believe that six weeks have already gone by so quickly.  It’s a bittersweet feeling as I know that I have learned a lot and had a lot of awesome experiences, but I also know that there is so much more to learn and experience.

The dominant theme of this week was looking at the big picture.  I find that I am more task-oriented and often lose sight of the big picture.  I still had to complete many short-term tasks, yet now I have learned that I must also understand the reason for doing each task.

   Finally, I get to actually jump into my project.  We recieved some data from the LISST 100x that we needed to process.  I had to do a couple of things before we could do this .  I needed to research all of the variables involved with the system.  Last week I compiled a list, but now I needed more information on each of the variables.  I thought that this was going to be a simple task, but unfortunately was a bit mistaken.

  This week was basically a frantic struggle to get back on schedule.  I was told that this week was going to be like this (the longest week of my life).  Monday and Friday were not so bad, though.  I started out the week and leisurely started reviewing the massive stack of scientific journals on my desk.  I later learned that I should not have been as leisurely as I needed to finish that massive stack by the next day. I did get to add to my list of definitions of scientific definitions that have a relevance to the project, so that was a positive, right?

   Week 2 was exceptionally busy.  I attended a site visit, collected back-scatter data in Astoria, and tried to get as much work done as possible in the two days remaining in the week.

This first week has been filled with moving in and meeting all of the other interns and learning about my project for the summer. I drove up to Beaverton from Sacramento and was delighted to finally arrive at my apartment on Friday evening. The apartment has a lot of amenities and is next to every bit of shopping that I could ever need so that was a great plus as well.