Week 6: 7/13/09 - 7/17/09

   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.

    I spent the first part of the week polishing up my presentation and giving it to Antonio.  He pointed out a couple of areas for improvement and commented on the overall flow. I was a little irked that I was spending SOOOO much time on my presentation, but it was worth it in the end.  We all gave our presentations in a somewhat scary lecture hall in the building next to the CMOP building.  We went by alphabetical order (which has always bit me by the way since my first name is Chelsea and my last name is DeSouza) so I went relatively early.  I was a little nervous which is kind of strange since I’ve been a Calc TA for three years now and am very used to lecturing.  The overall presentation was good, but I had to cut out some of the detail due to the time constraint.  My favorite part was the question asking session.  I feel like I answered the questions fairly competently and was overall pleased with the entire experience.

    I spent the next day experiencing what a truly unproductive day is like.  I was in meetings all day long and accomplished very little.  I first went to a talk given by a man that works with models and does work that is similar to my project.  The talk went completely over my head as it mostly dealt with sharing data and computer jargon.  I am starting to see that to be a modeler you must also be a programmer.  So, it looks like modeling is a career option that I can cross off of my list : ). I then tried to get as much work done as possible before I had to go to another meeting.  This meeting was a little strange as it was intended to be the meeting where we planned what we were going to talk about in the next meeting of the day.  I then had to run to the Furse class where I listened to some more interviews of tribal leaders. I then had to go to one last meeting of the day where they talked about two types of data and one being easier to share than the other.  It was a little over my head.  At the end of the meeting we got to talk to him a little bit about our project and the processing tools that we were using.  It turns out that MatLab is the best suited for our abilities and intention. 

    I finally got to get to work again on Thursday.  We have some new data and a method to partially process said data.  The progress was slowed down since I was looking for the best time frame to compare the data.  I think that I am simply going to just number it 1-whatever and normalize it so that 1 is the first point of interest and the last point corresponds to the last time data was taken.  Here is an example of a partially processed time-series of light-scattering concentration vs. salinity.  We are going to interpret the graphs next week. 

    My best friend also came up Thursday.  He missed his flight for the morning though so had to catch a later flight and had to take the train in.  It was super bad luck too because it was super hot that day.  I thought that this was a little funny because he was coming from Sacramento (which can be +100 for a couple of weeks) to come to Oregon, which we always used to think of as really cool, and found weather in the 90’s.  We spent the weekend in Portland hanging out and attending a festival.  I took him to see downtown and Saturday market (which is still one of the coolest things ever).

    We also started our (hopefully) weekly game of soccer.  We did pick the hottest time of the day to play and were all terribly out of practice, but had so much fun.  It turns out that I still have terrible aim when shooting for the goal, and I am significantly slower than when I played in high school : ). Still, I prefer the soccer to a boring lunch and really hope that we can get more people to play next time.

     I spent Friday trying to work out the graphs and best represent the comparisons.  I was getting super frustrated having to think of the most logical way to display the information.   It’s hard when you know that it’s just something that you have to work through, but your mentor could have probably come up with the answer in twenty minutes.