I'm on Alternate Spring Break (ASB) this year in Washington DC at the National Museum of Natural History - which is amazing! ASB matches SI students with public and non-profit institutions all over the country for a week long internship. It is a win-win for all of us: we get some extra work experience at some heavy-hitting institutions* and they get a week of free labor from us.
My internship is a perfect fit for me: large datasets, Visual Basic in Excel, and creating a better user experience, oh my! I'm working in the paleobiology department helping Dr. Lee-Ann Hayek, a statistician, rebuild an Excel workbook that she built. The program takes raw data of various samples counting the number of species (think: samples taken from different depths of the ocean floor) and breaks them into homogenous groupings. It can be used as a way to tell when (in space, depth, latitude, gradient, etc) the samples you've collected are distinct from each other. Dr. Hayek believes that this program - and the analysis that it is built upon - has a lot of applications ... she just needs help building a user-friendly experience. That's where I come in.
Fingers are crossed that I'll be able to finish everything I want to do before the week is up - but it was really heart-warming how excited everyone was about the work I started producing today. We're off to a good start!
I got out of work a little late today - but was still able to catch a local icon of DC: Ben's Chili Bowl
Caitlin getting excited about chili dogs
A short history of Ben's, in case you want to know more
Yummy!
The weather was perfect tonight (mid 40s?) so we walked back to the hotel. It has been so long since I've been to DC that I had totally forgotten how wonderfully walkable and pedestrian/bike-friendly it is here.
Oh. And to end on a light hearted-note this is the sign for the hotel where we're staying. Notice anything interesting about it...?
Bat Signal?
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*summer internships, anyone?
1 comment:
I love that you thought that the HH sign looks like a bat signal!
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