Day 3

Day Three – My Bosses Are Kinda Cool

Today my day began with a visit to Mecklenburg Representative William Brawley, the author of the bill designed to allow the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School System to establish a series of charter schools. This meeting was very brief yet I watched Ms. Devivo talk about two provisions that her clients would like to see in the bill. Mr. Brawley complemented me on my professionalism but Ms. Devivo told me not to make note of it as ‘he likes to mentor everyone.’ But it was a highlight of my day so I guess I’ll just make note of it here. Then we talked to Representative Craig Horn for a little while regarding the same subject. Afterwards we watched the full Senate debate the charter school bill. I had a great time watching senators get contentious about this bill, and, falling almost along party lines, the bill passed 30 for and 20 against. Afterwards we talked with another lobbyist for a little while regarding our new client.

Ms. Devivo and Ms. Sams acknowledged that today was a rather brief day and that I wouldn’t have that much to write about, so I guess I’ll just write about how cool they are as bosses. I am doing this for two reasons – 1. I gave them the link to this blog and so they can see what I say about them (Hi Ms. Devivo! Hi Ms. Sams! You guys are blog-worthy!) and 2. They are actually really cool bosses. They are especially funny and friendly to me which sometimes makes the days go by a little too quickly. As well they have no problem including me in all of their conversations with all of their clients, legislators, and other lobbyists, which I especially appreciate as it assists me in grasping their complex jobs. Today, even, they both gave me advice on how I should approach my stay at the DOT and after we were done with work Ms. Devivo showed me around the Lieutenant Governor’s Mansion. Thanks y’all!

A Look into Representative Horn’s Office

Swag on 10 from Ya Boyz at the Legislature

Day One: Legislature & Lobbying

My day in Downtown Raleigh in a lobbyist’s high-heeled pumps started off on the wrong foot- pun intended. I was a bit early, and I walked into what I thought was the right building, ready to seize the day… only to realize that I had entered the wrong legislative building! Fortunately, my mishap was not life-altering: the right building was only about 400 feet to my right, and I still managed to arrive right on time.

I met Mrs. Ashley Perkinson in the quad area/greenspace of the main legislative building for the first time. We sat down and chatted for a while about what were going to be the main events of our time together, and her job within the complex system that is state legislature. She is a lobbyist with a focus in advocacy for underrepresented groups, which I admire very much. She also commended our luck for my arrival on such a hallowed day: just last night, the North Carolina budget for the 2018-19 fiscal year was announced. As one could imagine, the Senators and Representatives that comprise of the NC Congress had much to say about the cuts, re-allocations, and new funding all together. We still had about an hour to kill before the 10 am committee session, and Mrs. Perkinson had some letters of thanks to deliver to various senators and representatives for their help passing one of her bills that she was strongly advocating for, which happened to be better suicide prevention aid, resources, and accessibility for teens. In this time, we also scheduled many meetings for tomorrow!

After this, we waited outside the main chamber in which the discourse would be held for about 30 minutes before the doors were opened. I couldn’t help but notice how strikingly similar the shuffle inside the doors towards the seating area was to the students at CA slowly making their way into the lunchroom… but I digress! The next three hours or so were filled with members of the house and senate speaking on the various budget augmentations and contractions, and they spoke on everything from school safety to the need for cleaner drinking water produced from Falls Lake. I took copious notes, as did almost everyone else in the room! After these discussions, there was a questioning period that I would consider to be the most interesting component of this particular activity. The questions were mostly unfiltered with the intention to clear up, gain further knowledge, or even discredit certain parts of the budget, and the latter most certainly made for the most entertaining for the viewer.

After this, we had a late lunch with one of Mrs. Perkinson’s co-workers that happens to be a close confidant at the Planet Cafe, and we discussed everything from their typical daily schedule to what is usually debated about within Speech and Debate. I enjoyed my day of getting acclimated to one of the more important moments in legislature, and also getting to know Mrs. Perkinson!

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 – Now It’s Getting Hot In Here

Day 3 was a slow day, for a multitude of reasons. As I quickly learned, Thursdays are often the slowest days for the museum as a whole, so the number of kids that visited our lab decreased by a significant margin. In addition, the central air conditioning of the building crashed around 11:00, so the lab, which is a large, glass-walled room, acted in the same manner a greenhouse does, trapping heat – and us – inside. By the end of the day, the room was about 85 degrees, and that definitely didn’t encourage more foot traffic to visit our lab. As if the heat wasn’t enough, at around 3:00, my computer had a fatal error, and refused to turn on for the rest of the day. The lab has about 20 computers of it’s own, so it wouldn’t be a problem, except for the fact that all the code that I had written had been saved on my desktop, so it was inaccessible from the other computers. Despite all of the adverse conditions, I still had a fruitful and productive day, finishing my hardware for my Morse code decoder, complete with LCD screen and all, and assembling the circuitry for a new piezoelectronic keyboard, which would play tones at the touch of a finger. One fantastic story came when one of the lab’s volunteers, an older gentleman who helps with the kids, was looking at my project over my shoulder, and remarked “shouldn’t pin 4 connect the ground to the VCC of the LCD?” I was surprised – I had been stuck on an error for a while, and I hadn’t interacted with him previously. I said “maybe!”, and tried it out, re-uploaded the code, and it worked! It just goes to show you – take all the help you can get!

DAY 3: Oops.

Day 3 in the Sheikh lab began with a bang, or should I say a splat? In the morning I watched Matt, one of the research technicians, complete a series of protocols to isolate RNA from a human tissue sample. However, on the way from the fume hood to the walk-in fridge, Matt dropped one of the samples and about half of it splattered out across the floor. We had to stop what we were doing and carefully clean up the mess with ethanol to take care of the potential safety hazard. Even though we laughed about the silly mistake, it brought up a good point: accidents happen all the time in the lab, and what’s most important is how you choose to deal with them. Even though Matt lost over half of the treated sample, he decided to continue processing it anyways, because any amount of tissue can provide helpful data. If you decide to throw out the sample after you’ve already done a lot of work with it, you’re just wasting resources. The spill also brought up the necessity of the taking careful notes during your experiment, so that when you get inconsistent or abnormal data, you can come up with an explanation for what might have happened. For example, once the isolation process was completed, the sample that spilled would have significantly less RNA in it, so in order to explain the results, you’d have to look back and remember that you lost half of the sample.

TRIzol, a chemical buffer used in the homogenization process

The human tissue samples being kept cool in an ice bucket

Centrifuging the tiny samples in the giant walk-in fridge!

A view through a microscope of artificially grown cells called colonoids. I’ve just started learning about what the lab’s doing to grow these cells and do experiments with them, and I’m excited to discover more!

Today was one of the more interesting days. Throughout the day the reps were in session debating and voting on bills. It was cool to see the actual process behind the whole policy making. There were only really 2 highly controversial bills that the Reps. spent a lot of time on debating.

Day 3

I had a painful start to my day, as soon as I got out of my car, I hadn’t even opened the door all the way, I was stung by a flying insect I didn’t even get a good look at, and my hand swelled up and turned red immediately. I wandered around the building until I found the cafeteria and got ice (and some weird looks). While this was no means a learning experience it was certainly a highlight of my day. The only thing happening that day was another session, where the House of Reps would be voting on a few bills, and eventually the budget. As I took my seat, the Speaker informed everyone that the session would most likely go on until midnight, as they have to nitpick the entire budget, so I only saw the discussion on the individual bills. The bills on the docket included important issues, like one on the sex offender registry and a telecommunications box that was a potential carcinogen. To my surprise, however, the most contentious debate was over the bill I mentioned in day 1, about interior designers and architects. So many reps would ramble on about the issue, blowing it, in my opinion, out of proportion. I spoke with Representative Martin afterwards about it and he agreed that many important issues don’t get the debate they deserve because so much focus is on industry-related bills, and from what the reporter told me yesterday, this often has to do with which side (interior designers or architects) have the most money or influence in the General Assembly. Outside of the very heated debate about windows and low bearing walls, the members seemed pretty friendly with each other. One pulled out a basket of fruit to share, another said there was donuts in his office anyone could grab. And another made a point of personal preference, stood up, and gave a speech about his fellow rep and to wish him a happy birthday, and told everyone that “he loved chocolate”, after which everyone who had chocolate candy on their desk gave him some of theirs. It was honestly the cutest thing I’ve ever witnessed. Although I was annoyed by the interior designer bill, it was nice to see how nice the 120 members could be to each other.

Day 3

Today was a pretty quiet day at the office. When we showed up in the morning we had a quick meeting with a woman named Morgan, and then she gave us an assignment that took us the majority of the day to finish. We moved rooms and ended up working at the “intern desks,” which meant that we finally got to formally meet one of the two other college interns that were working at French West Vaughn. I never actually caught her name but she was going into her senior year at UNC for marketing and was interning at FWV all summer. We talked to her for a little while about how she got into marketing and how she ended up with her internship. What was interesting was that she said she had no idea that she would end up in marketing when she was our age, and that when she was in high school she wanted to be a marine biologist. She sounded a lot like Rich, the Artistic Director for FWV that we met the day before. Rich also said that he never thought he would be in marketing and design when he was younger. He had told us that he wanted to be a teacher when he started college, but then slowly moved away from teaching and into graphic design as time went on. I guess both Rich and the other Intern we met just show that you don’t necessarily have to know exactly what you want to do going into college because even if you do, your interests could easily change as time goes on.

Day 3: WOW!

I’ve been told my posts are too lengthy, so I’ll try to condense a very busy day and touch on what I feel were the most exciting points. It’s difficult, as were exposed to so many different projects today!

First, a follow up on the cement experiment we set up on the first day: we got great results, and a graph to go with it! The results were aligned with our expectations. Sugars are a retardant in the hydration process of cement and salts are a catalyst. I was shocked to see the difference between the samples with 1% maltodextrin (sugar) and 1% calcium chloride (salt). The maltodextrin sample was still so fluid that it could be easily stirred and poured (see picture). The calcium chloride sample, however, was rock solid – there would have been no way to get it out except cutting open the container (see picture). I did learn that a sample with 0.05% sugar can retard the process by 12 hours, and since we used 1.00%, it could be weeks before our sample sets.

Graph showing the different rates at which cement mixtures hydrated

The main activity we did today was making WOW particles – water in oil in water particles. They are essentially delivery devices, and the specific WOW particles we made are used for delivering substances into oil wells. The core water, which we colored with food coloring, the second layer is a monomer that serves as the oil, and the third later is water. The “fusing” of the layers, or emulsion, is then set off by shining a UV light on it (see picture). The final step was to put the particles we made under a microscope and look at what we made – cute little spheres! (see pictures)

Speaking of microscopes, we got to observe an amazing one in the afternoon. It was an SEM microscope, short for scanning electron microscope, that produces detailed images of extremely small particles by scanning them with a focused beam of electrons. There was one particular example image on display, where the microscope was able to show the bumps and ridges on a single human hair. (see picture) The technology is extraordinary, and I feel so lucky to have seen such beautiful images of spectacularly small particles. (see pictures)

Human hair magnified 3,000x with the SEM

Day 3

I came into today very excited to experience something different as we were about to explore the more creative part of SAS, Corporate Creative in building U. We met Aaron and Ashley who spent half the day showing us projects and how they create advertisements and booths for SAS. After explaining that to us and showing us programs and projects for a few hours we attended a creative meeting where employees express concerns about their projects and ask for help. It was neat seeing how they all helped each other make design decisions. Before lunch, we went on the “scenics tour” which is to the warehouse where all the printing and wood workshop and art is! Immediately after we went to lunch in C again. Here we met Ed Harriss who would be with us for the rest of the day in the video production building V. Ed gave us a tour of the building which consisted of many studios and equipment. Our last part of the day was spent in his office talking about what his job consists of and him showing us some of his most recent computer graphics work. George and I are excited to experience the marketing branch for our fourth day at SAS.