Today was very chill and I had a lot of freedom to choose what I wanted to do. I followed one of Michelle’s coworkers and watched her conduct an experiment to create new bacteria cultures with a microbiologist. The apparatus was very complex (see pic below) and their goal was to use this machine to make “holes” (not sure if technical term or not) for bacteria cultures to grow. It took about an hour and a half for the experiment to run so I got to know Dr. Kim and Neylyn very well and had a lot of fun talking to them. After they were done, I returned with Dr. Kim to her lab for a tour, and she eagerly showed me all of her growing bacteria and fungi cultures. They smelled pretty bad but really cool nonetheless!!
Later in the day I met with an engineer/economist and had a really good chat with him. He is super smart and very very veryyy enthusiastic about his work. I mainly met with him because he works at the intersection of my interests (as of now), engineering/physical sciences and economics. He told me all about his job and the projects he does and how having knowledge in both fields has helped him with his career. He also gave me life advice for college and my career – including how important it is to make connections through these types of internships, and to know the job market even during freshman year. He was so incredibly passionate about his job that even I started to get excited about the projects he was working on – even though I literally did not know thermal engineering existed before meeting him!! I have learned so much through my first week at RTI and I cannot wait to continue working next week!
