Z WEP Archives – Page 207 – CA Work Experience Program

Day 3- RTI

During my 3rd day at RTI, I got to experience a lot of cool lab technologies. Firstly, Kiera and I worked to create WOW particles in the lab, which stands for “water in oil in water”, and are truly, wow. These particles have a core, which in this case was simply water and food dye, to see the particles better, and then they are encapsulated in a two-layer shell. This technology is used to create a shell around particles, and this particular project was used for delivering chemicals into oil wells that can withstand the harsh conditions of the well. A lot of this process we couldn’t really see, as it is done by UV curing, and UV rays are harmful to look at. However, at the end of this process we were left with what looked like thousands of microscopic beads at the bottom of a test tube. While initially this didn’t look very exciting, it was way cooler when viewed under a microscope. We could see that each of these beads were perfect circles, encapsulating 1 or a few little particles. We used a variety of food dye, just so we could see the slight differences.

The afternoon brought yet another amazing experience with microscopes. We visited the SEM microscope, which uses electrons as opposed to rays of light, and can see things smaller than 1 nanometer, or about 1/100,000 the width of a human hair! First, we had to coat various objects, which were foams created with tiny glass balls to decrease their density, in metal so that the microscope could pick up the textures. This was done by creating a plasma of argon gas in a vacuum around the objects, which glowed an amazing purple-pink. Then we got to see objects 20,000x zoomed in under the microscope. It was incredible to see the immense texture of objects that looked completely smooth to the naked eye.

Day 3: Legal, Jonathan Segal

Today was spent in legal with one of their government relations lawyers. We spent the day looking at different contracts, which although opaque, was still very interesting. One of the parts of his job is examining the contracts they send to clients vs. the versions they send back signed to insure there are no discrepancies, a job which I was able to help out in (despite my 0 years of law school). I managed to uncover that SAS clients often use a different formatting method that led to certain words being pushed to different lines than the original copy. The lawyer assured me it wasn’t a massive conspiracy to cheat SAS out of hard earned cash, but I’m still suspicious. (I didn’t grab any pictures of the contracts for security reasons, but I’ve added a colorized re-creation for reference.)

The rest of the day was with a lawyer who does government lobbying for SAS which was very cool. He took me on my first real tour of the facility. My favorite place was the video creation facility where they create all of SAS’s internal videos. I took a picture of one of their custom studios. It was a very cool day.

Picture refrences:

http://malloryminute.com/paper-paper-everywhere/

Day 4- Web Design

My fourth day at SAS was spent in web design! There I started by talking with one of the managers of the website, and she explained to me some of the difficulties in making sure the American SAS website was well-coordinated with all of the international SAS branch websites. I met with another person who was responsible for that coordination, and it was very interesting to see the different types of avenues through which messages had to be sent. In the afternoon, I met with an individual whose primary responsibility was managing the SAS intranet’s websites. She showed me some of the tools used to edit the website and even set up a sample site for me to play around with the tools on. It was cool to see the systems used by SAS to create web content and be able to actually mess with the tools first-hand. Before this day, I always assumed that web design was far more technical. However, despite its technical aspects, I learned about how aesthetic decisions also have to be made when it comes to web design, and how there is an entire department for that as well. Overall, I learned a lot, and look forward to the rest of my rotations!

Day 4: Am I touring or am I the tour itself?

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Today I helped one of the people I work with, Ryan, lead a tour with the visiting Cary Academy Art DT. It was very weird to help with the tour but also be apart of it myself since I haven’t had much gallery time. Brent Shelton was on this Art DT and took the video linked with this blog post of me handing out clipboards to do the interactive gallery activities on. The rest of the day was pretty boring so the highlight was the tour today. I really enjoyed seeing the tour from two different view points. The tour also made me appreciate Ryan a lot more.

Day 3: I’m Only 17!

Today I had to write directions for the new activities, cut out name tags, and do a lot of other things. But today, I was put in charge of organizing the Nasher snapchat. Seems easy right? Wrong. I have to meet with marketing people and education area members and I’m just some 17 year old! I don’t know what I’m doing! I have to get approval of everything. They think someone will hack the snapchat of an art museum. I can’t tell if they’re being paranoid or not. Here are some images of the calming board room so I can calm down as well.

The view of the inside is just as nice as the view outside.

Day 2: My Own Weird Room

I can’t believe it’s already Wednesday! Today I did a lot of cutting things out. Thankfully no paper cuts. I got my own weird room to sit and cut in. The best part of the day was working with the head gallery attendant, Ruth. She asked for my advice on new activities for kids to do at the teen party on Saturday and she was really happy with what I came up with. There is a sculpture of a sound suit in the West gallery and I came up with the idea of having boxes of different items and kids have to shake to guess the objects by their weight and sound. Don’t get me wrong this wasn’t round breaking but if I was a kid I’d want to make as much noise as possible.

These are the outside and inside views of my room.

Day 4: CBS NC

I started the morning bright and early at 6:30 am Friday morning. The producer wanted me to see one of the earlier shows to give me an idea of just what I was getting myself in to in the television industry. I was even more mortified to hear one of the directors say his shift started at 3 am. Despite my early start (I’m really not a morning person at all), I still had quite an enjoyable day. My favorite part of the day was shadowing a studio director for an hour. I got to be live on set while the anchors were on television and I got to watch the show first hand. Another entertaining moment was when I had the opportunity to sit in the control room and watch as the directors called the entire show. It was so fast paced and loud, definitely an area I thrive in. If there is anything I have learned so far from my work experience it is that you have to be flexible, creative, and confident in the television industry.

Day 6

Today I once again got to help coordinate the Mini Wool E’s which is by far my favorite promo event. We found 4 kids around 5 or 6 years old and dressed them up in mini Wool E. Bull costumes. They then ran around with the real Wool E. Bull in a “follow the leader” type fashion on the field between innings. While the crowd only got to experience about 2 minutes of their cuteness, I had the luxury of guiding them, helping them get dressed, and then waiting with them. They were some of the cutest kids ever and although it’s not easy getting them dressed and keeping them occupied for an unknown amount of time, it’s very enjoyable.

DAY 4 – Too Much(Fun)gi!

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!

making the bacteria cultures (also could be featured in the RTI newsletter so stay tuned)

Mighty Awesome Day

Saturday Morning RPG, one of Mighty Rabbit’s most famous games

Today was such a fun day. We first got a tour of the Mighty Rabbit Studio, which as you can see below is a very fun and casual environment. We learned that they founded another company called “Limited Run Games”. It’s a really cool idea: they take games that were only available on digital or old classics and publish them to consoles like PS4 or PS Vita, but only for a “limited run”. (Once they sell out, they don’t buy more to sell – they keep the supply is limited). Right now they are preparing to release Broken Age to PS4 and PS Vita, so they have boxes all over the place ready to be filled with the games once they have to ship the games. Soon after, we got to meet with and talk to Ben Moore, a producer at Mighty Rabbit Studios, which gave us perspective in a lot of aspects of the business of game design. For example, as a small company, they have to make games for other companies to bring in the profits because taking 3 years off to make a game based on your own idea takes millions of dollars and time; something a small company doesn’t have access to. But, because they are an independent small company, we got to play Super Smash Bros and their new game Battlesloths at lunchtime. At the end of the day, we made a schedule for next week, and it looks awesome. Quite the collection