Day 2

Day 2 – Introduction to SAS Software/CECL

This morning I showed up a little late because I misheard Ms. Hager when she told me what building to show up to yesterday. I originally came to T when I should have gone to C, however, this wasn’t a huge deal as I parked and I came in near the beginning of the meeting. The presenter was very lively and engaging and it he made it very easy for me to be engaged and interested in learning about a new topic that I was unfamiliar with. Basically, he was teaching all ten or so people in the room the importance of calculating expected credit loss when customers default on loans. They used many different acronyms that were really unfamiliar to me, but I tried my best to understand what was going on. I participated in a presentation with three other employees on how we would pitch SAS’s CECL product (a model to precisely predict expected credit loss on defaults) to a CFO of a target business. I learned many key presenting points such as the “Tell, Show, and Tell method,” and how important it is to use repetition to emphasize the main point of your talk. My group’s presentation went well and later at lunch I met with college interns and talked with them and then I ate lunch with the Pre-Sales team I was working with before lunch. After lunch, I went back upstairs to the conference room and continued to learn more in-depth aspects of CECL and how it is helpful for businesses. Their CECL program will launch by Jan 1st 2020, so SAS needs to finish up the software and find get in contact with potential clients between now and then.

5/30/18 – Degree of Badness

Today, I sat in on a meeting and was able to assist in giving input. We were determining how to decide the “degree of badness” for different problems. This is because currently, how bad problems such as diabetes are is on a stepwise scale: if you have a rating of 20.0, you’re on the very high side of normal, but if you go to 20.1, you’re terrible. We are trying to determine what the best way of measuring how bad a problem is without it being a stepwise function. After the meeting, I continued working on the girth calculation equation and programming a way to input all girth calculations into our stat sheet with every person in it.

Once again, for privacy reasons, I am refraining from sharing any photos as we have been working with data from real human beings.

Day 2: Subservice Utility Engineering

My second day at SEPI kicked off with meeting Wally Little, the Subservice Utility Engineering Manager. He explained to me that the responsibilities of his department consist of locating, mapping out, and planning the installation and management of any underground system or utility. This includes sewers, gas lines, water lines and pipes, electrical lines, phone lines, TV lines, and more. Do you ever see those spray-painted colored markings, lines, and words on streets, grass, and sidewalks and wonder what they’re for? Well I did too until today. The markings are used to show the location of the underground utilities listed above. Often times, the pipes and/or lines are at different levels of depth, but they are always (or at least they should be) directly underneath their designated marking. Blue spray paint represents a water line or system, green represents a waste/sewer system, red represents electric power lines, orange represents communication lines (cable, phone, TV lines, etc.), and yellow represents gas lines. We traveled to a project that Mr. Little was working on where he and his team were hired to locate and mark the underground utilities in a neighborhood. I received a detailed explanation about how they are able to exactly locate an underground system without being able to see it, or without the aid of previously drawn maps of the different utilities in an area. I’ll give you guys the short version. So basically, they hook up a complicated device similar to a metal detector that makes a loud noise whenever it is swung over any electrical or metal object. Based on the type of sound the device makes and some other information that appears on a screen on the device, you can tell what type of utility you’ve located. Once you’ve decided which type of line, pipe, or system you’ve located, you then use the appropriate spray paint color to paint a dot, line, or short description (usually abbreviations or initials – i.e. TV, Tele., etc.) of the system after every 15 or so steps of following the utility’s trail. I was allowed to spray-paint an entire quarter-mile long electric line! The reason for marking these utilities’ locations is usually to ensure the safety of those near them, and to show where and where not to dig into the ground so that you will not damage or strike one of these systems. For example, you wouldn’t want to stick a metal fence post into the ground and hit a 300,000-volt electric line, because you would instantaneously explode and die. We would like to avoid that if possible. It felt like I was potentially saving lives when they let me mark the electric lines, so that was quite a nice feeling to end my day with.

Mr. Little showing me how to use the scanning device while I hold the spray paint gun

Again I went to his house to continue my work. This time I met a few of his co-workers. They had a meeting discussing what they were going to do going forward and stuff they needed to fix in their code. We talked a lot about genes and the affect they have on a person with different things. Then we went and got lunch at a pizza place in Raleigh. After, we came back and finished the meeting. We then continued into our statistical analysis of our data. We were looking for trends and correlation between sets. I will continue doing this tomorrow and the next few days. There aren’t any pictures from today due to confidentiality.

Day 2 – Middle School Madness

My second day of working with the IS department started off quite well and very productive. Firstly I was excited to finish re-imaging the stacks of computers set before me on day one and getting that task complete felt extremely satisfying. After those computers were done I was introduced to a cart full of even more computers waiting to be prepared for sale to teachers and staff. Interestingly with these computers, their startup includes the virtual assistant Cortana talking the user through the setup. When you have 10 Cortanas all talking over each other at varying times it sounds a little bit like the Seagulls from Finding Nemo. After working on those for a while it was time to collect the middle schoolers tablets which as one can imagine takes the entire IS department to handle. During the process, I was walking in classrooms helping teachers and checking names on tablets for collection all while wading through a sea of middle schoolers. After all the chaos we had carts stacked high with the collected computers and with the rain pouring outside we stowed the tablets in a closet and ended our days work.

Day Two – 5/30

On day 2, things got much more interesting as we got more into the rhythm of the work place and the environment of the lab overall. First thing in the morning, we got lost and walked back and forth across NC State campus a couple times before finally finding the correct meeting place and meeting with Dr. Laber. He took us through some more statistics lessons and we learned how to calculate the depth of data sets, how to analyze different scenarios and determine solutions to problems such as indicators of if various paralyzed dogs will recover in 6 weeks or 6 months. After learning more statistics, to which Luke and I felt intrigued but lost…we headed off for our lunch break. Meeting Lindsay Callihan for lunch was fun, we ate on Hillsborough street with her since she is also working on NC State campus with a digital marketing firm (happy birthday Lindsay!). After a relaxing lunch break we went back to the BOM where we met with Allison Wu again to continue helping her take images and train her chess-playing robot, Nona! After playing lots of computer-generated chess games and taking nearly 800 automated images, we went out for coffee with Allison and Lisa, one of the designers at Laber Labs. Lisa went to Green Hope for high school, NC state for undergrad, and is now working with Laber Labs full time. She was super helpful talking about the field in general and giving us insight on her background coming into Laber Labs. Overall, the day was really good. We learned a lot about statistics and got to help out more! Getting to know the undergraduate, graduate, and full-time workers who are a part of Laber Labs is really neat. Everyone is super welcoming, nice, and funny and I can’t wait to meet the rest of the team these upcoming two weeks!

Day 2- Server Farms and Rocks

My day began with Ms Dawn Smith, who showed me the platform she was creating for the website that contained all of the agreements with SAS and their clients. Using SAS and Java code, she worked to both improve the interface as well as make the information on the site more available and succinct. After learning about what she and her team were up to, I spent time with Jonathan Hairr. Mr. Hairr serves as technical support for executives only, ranging from senior vice presidents all the way up to Dr. Goodnight. I assisted him in delivering materials throughout the SAS campus to different employees, as well as getting a look at some of the unique rooms each building has. After a tour of the supply depot, Mr. Hairr took me to the executive building (C Building), where I was able to visit not only Dr. Goodnight’s office and conference room, but his rock collection as well. Holding pieces from all around the world, it gave the executive offices a personality of their own.

Come lunch time, I shared my table with Trish Hailey, in charge of security and various other jobs in the IT department. We discussed everything ranging from what brought her to SAS, as well as what the company is doing to stay innovative and secure. After lunch I went back to the supply depot to spend some time with Jonathan Smith and his team, where I saw where the broken equipment was refurbished and shipped back out into rotation. Additionally, I inspected the configuration of conference rooms, tested of of the technology they are attempting to deploy throughout the campus, and met the man who programmed/controlled BB-8 for the Last Jedi red carpet premiere. I ended the day with Will Phillips, who took me to the facilities that allow SAS to function on a day to day basis. I visited the servers, affectionately referred to as Server Farms 1 and 2. There, I was able to witness their heating and cooling system designed to get the best possible performance from their hardware. Mr. Phillips took me to the “chillers”, machines that miraculously get air to flow from cold to hot instead of the usual hot to cold. Lastly, I examined the charts of SAS’s energy efficiency, such as the RTI of their air flow and brainstormed ways to make the system more effective to make it more cost efficient and environmentally friendly.

Dr. Goodnight’s extensive Geode collection

R Building’s cafeteria

The executive conference room at C Building

The supply depot

Day 2

Today, Jonathon and I arrived back at the entigral office around 9:30 this morning. We right away began by completing more research, as Mr. Self asked us to go further into our research that we completed yesterday. Much of what is done in this office is research that can later be used to sell the product, very different then what I was expecting. We also created a proposal powerpoint that Mr. Self can use for introducing the product to any other car dealership. While Jonathon took over the task of collecting data from the car dealerships all over North Carolina (there’s a lot), I worked on completing a spreadsheet that included all the car dealership associations in the 50 states. It turned out to be very difficult to find the president, phone number, and the number of dealerships represented by the dealerships of these associations. We also grabbed some food at a nice food truck across the street. It was a very full day! This is a picture of one of the data sheets that we have been collecting both days.

Day 2 – New and Old Creations

Today, I woke up excited to pay another visit to Suite 420 at the Chesterfield Lab in Durham, working on refining yesterday’s project and exploring a new realm of creation. In the morning, Dr. Kirillova and I worked with 3D printing expert Rex; he explained the fundamentals of using a rather sophisticated software to 3D print a model that Dr. Kirillova had in mind. Rex clarified that there are many careful considerations when choosing settings to 3D print a model! These include factors like the material used (PLA, polylactic acid, or PVA, polyvinyl alcohol), the nozzle and Printcore used, the temperature of the Printcore, and the speed at which the object is filled.

At first, the settings we had used to print the object did not make the printer happy and it wouldn’t complete the job at all. After spending a good hour troubleshooting the machine, we finally got our first model. However, it wasn’t our best model because it lacked an outer perimeter, so the volume percent of the filler was not entirely accurate since the model was not a perfect cube. We tried a second time, adding a perimeter layer so that the object would be more substantial and accurate. Surprisingly, it worked well! After Olivia’s return later in the afternoon, we all printed several more models. Dr. Kirillova also brought to my attention that there are several other types of 3D printing used for different applications. Today, we used one called fuse deposition, whereby solid material is melted to print the new models. Other techniques include carbon printing, titanium printing, printing that uses liquid resin, and even bioprinting, whereby living cells are printed in hydrogels!

The purpose of the print today was to combine it with the bone adhesive to test its structural durability. In other words, the PGLA fiber filler that I mentioned yesterday is similar to the PLA (Polylactic Acid) material used today to print the models. We printed porous cubes of different designs, all 28% PLA and 72% open space by volume, so that tetranite could later be applied inside the open spaces within the cube and solidify to create a strong structure. The PLA housing acts almost like a scaffold for the tetranite. These filled cubes can later be strength tested to see how much the PLA structure will help reinforce the brittle tetranite. In theory, these PLA cubes (or those of other shapes) can be used alongside the tetranite to create the most durable, efficient, and biodegradable solution to help mend broken bones together inside bodies! More complex bone repairs will of course require more durability relative to the size of the combination used. Lucky for us, PLA is a biodegradable material despite its plastic-like appearance.

In the afternoon, Olivia and I polished the bone adhesive samples we made yesterday (her titanium and my salt sample). The process consists of placing the cylindrical sample in a mold that will hold it in place while it is sanded against fine sandpaper with water. This helps to smoothen the top and bottom surfaces of the cylinder, so when it undergoes compression testing later, the data collected will be more accurate. In addition, we measured the lengths and widths of the polished samples with a caliper, something I had actually never used before this day! Olivia’s titanium samples were quite easy to polish, and they even gave off a nice shine after they were completed. My salt samples, however, proved to be more brittle, so I was only able to successfully polish two of my four original samples. Nevertheless, I am thankful that I was granted permission to collect my samples and one of the 3D printed models today to bring home; they will serve as a lasting souvenir of an incredibly captivating project!

Tomorrow, I am assigned to work in a compression lab to witness some of the actual strength tests that are performed on the polished bone adhesive samples. This lab will be on Duke’s campus, so I am eager to take the next step of this invigorating journey in a fresh environment!

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Day 2!

Today, Jonathon and I arrived back at the Entigral office around 9:30 this morning. We right away began by completing more research, as Mr. Self asked us to go further into our research that we completed yesterday. Much of what is done in this office is research that can later be used to sell the product, very different then what I was expecting. We also created a proposal powerpoint that Mr. Self can use for introducing the product to any other car dealership. While Jonathon took over the task of collecting data from the car dealerships all over North Carolina (there’s a lot), I worked on completing a spreadsheet that included all the car dealership associations in the 50 states. It turned out to be very difficult to find the president, phone number, and the number of dealerships represented by the dealerships of these associations. We also grabbed some food at a nice food truck across the street. It was a very full day! This picture is a spreadsheet of some of the state car dealership associations that we found while collecting the data.