Today Justin Tunley and I visited the Human Resources department of SAS! We were greeted in the morning by Bethany LeClair, who was able to tell us all about SAS , what they do, and her position. She talked to us about how with her job, she is able to go to different universities, campuses, and career fairs and promote SAS software, as well as try to recruit more people to intern/work at SAS. I thoroughly enjoyed talking to Ms. LeClair, and thought she shared a really interesting perspective on how the data can be used! Later on, Justin and I shadowed another woman in the HR department and spent the rest of the day with her. She told us all about college, her life, and provided us with advice for the HR department. I found it interesting because going into the day, I did not really have any grasp of what HR was responsible for, and she clearly explained all of the different departments to us and what they did. One thing I particularly liked that she said was about technology and knowledge in general. She told us that as part of her job, she is always having to teach herself new websites and programs. She said that although this can sometimes be challenging, that in the end it is really interesting and that it can be beneficial to constantly seek out new technology and new knowledge!
Tag: Day 4
Day 4
Today I did a little more research on Dr. Malone and his works and writing. Before today I did brief research on him and discovered that he wrote an entire book on country music titled Country Music, USA and it was published in 1968, but has since had more editions come out. While I couldn’t get my hands on a copy or an online copy, I read several reviews of the book from journals on JSTOR. One review that I found gave a very nice overview of the book and was unbiased. The journal article was titled on JSTOR as Review: Country Music U.S.A A Fifty-Year History by Bill C. Malone. And it was reviewed by Gilbert Chase. His review was very clear and concise but used several quotes from the book itself. It went over what the book was about. The book is not just about country music but the history behind it, how country music came to be a thing in the USA. It talked about how the attitudes of the rural southerners filtered into the music. The book admits that country music does stem from folk music but has evolved saying that is changed per the region it was in. For example Oklahoma and Texas became more Western swing rather than folky mountain music and so on. It also described how Dr. Bill C. Malone feels about country music and he feels that it is still primarily in the south and that he south contributed to the creation of a lasting regional music. The book not only analyzed specific careers of country stars, like the first one, Jimmy Rogers aka the father of modern country music, but also went over the different styles of country music, historically such as: Western swing, honky tonk, country-pop, the “Nashville sound,” saga song, bluegrass, urban folk song, etc. the review also stated that Dr. Malone feels that country music will never be fully appreciated by American culture to those who don’t listen to it because Americans are busy giving higher praise to other genres and tend not to pay attention to it. Overall the reviews were good but I thought this was the best one out of the ones I read. Dr. Malone still hasn’t called me back from yesterday, so I will most likely give him one more day to call back until I call again.
Day 4
Today I continued to work on my assignment of building a 3-D model for a current client. To my surprise, the house looked better than I thought. Once I added on the roof and little acccesories it felt complete. What felt like minutes working on the 3-D model was actually hours of clicking and dragging shapes. Other than the 80s and 90s music playing in the background, the office was very peaceful and I felt like I got a lot done. Today was also the last day of working at Linton Architects so it sad to say goodbye to everyone. Every single employee made me feel comfortable and tried to inform me with whatever they were working on. After lunch I went back to my table and continued to work on the finishing touches of the 3-D model. It’s amazing to see that a drawing could be turned into something a step further. I really enjoyed working with Mr. Linton and the rest of the employees and will use the knowledge that I gained in the future. I look forward to working in downtown Raleigh in a much larger firm called LS3P. 
Day 4
Today was my fourth day at SAS as a part of the Cary Academy Work Experience Program and my day was spent in the Marketing department in Building C. My favourite part of the day came when I talked to Mr. David Phillips, the Senior Digital Marketing Specialist. Mr. Phillips explained to me how he is responsible for pushing SAS’s websites and resources to the top of the Google search engine. He does this by bidding on keywords which then allows SAS’s sites to appear closer to the top of the Google page. I found it super interesting how some key words such as “Big Data” could code up to $50 a click. That means when someone types in “Big Data” into Google and hen proceeds to click on the SAS.com link below, that click costs $50! Although the day was mostly spent talking to employees of the Marketing Department, I was able to venture up to the sixth floor and inspect Dr. Goodnight’s world reknown rock collection. His collection contained geodes from India, fossils from Egypt, and stalactites from Spain!
Day 4- Corporate Creative
Thuc and I really enjoyed today. We learned how the graphic design team comes together to create the look of SAS. Even though we were not very interested in graphic design, it was still interesting to learn about what goes on behind the scenes of SAS. We saw the programs they used, and the demos of the designs they make. Thuc and I got a full tour of SAS as well, and our favorite part was the video production room. Thuc and I went to the room and pretended to be on film, which was a lot of fun. We also saw where the designs are officially printed, and the machines were huge! We could really see how much work is put into these designs. We can’t wait for next week!
Day 4
The most interesting part about my time at Forthright today came after lunch, when Steve, Bryan, and another engineer named Graydon met together to talk about new internal projects. A lot of the work that the company does comes from clients, people who have this idea that they need someone else to create for them. However, they also occasionally meet to discuss ideas the engineers have thought of for new products they could create. The meeting consisted of the engineers creating a list of concepts they had brainstormed and explaining the rationale behind each idea and what the market for that product is like now. They then ranked their top three ideas and the ones with the most votes were noted to be researched later and followed up on. During this ideation process, I saw many aspects of group brainstorming that I’ve been taught in robotics and art and design. No concepts were rejected or thought of as bad ideas, and everyone was open each other’s thoughts, instead of being close-minded and only focusing on what they had thought of. This type of objective conversation helped the engineers reach an agreement of which products they thought were best to pursue efficiently and without overlooking anyone’s thoughts.
Day 4
To begin, here is the quote of the day, the week, and even possibly the entire work experience program: “I’m still trying to get this lubricant off of my hands.” This was calmly/ordinarily said by our esteemed tour guide, our biology expert, at FHI 360’s product quality and control center, more commonly known as the PQC. There, people are tasked with testing contraceptives – condoms, IUDs, tablets – as well as other items including bed nets and more in many different ways.
Although most people would find the discussion of condoms and contraceptives uncomfortable, awkward or downright embarrassing, Hope, Caroline, Maddie and I quickly became immune to this type of talk following today’s interesting (to say the least) experience. Despite being kindly lectured on the difficulty of reaching this destination, Celia, Maddie, and I found the PQC with ease; Hope and Caroline piled into the car with Lauren and followed.
Upon arrival, we were each given a pair of safety glasses, to be worn at all times in the lab, validating the “realness” of the situation. We were immediately shown the various tests condoms go through, both male and female, with demonstrations.
First, we saw condoms being attached to a device and filled with a certain amount of water, testing whether or not they had holes and were able to hold a certain mass. If just two of the selected batch failed, the entire group is found to be unacceptable. In addition to this, the water-filled condoms were tied at the end and rolled onto a board, again testing their structure.
The next part of the tour was probably the coolest: the Airbust. We entered a room with a sign outside labeled something along the lines of “DANGER! Use ear protection.” Yes, we were going to explode condoms. This test is particularly important, for each condom must reach a certain volume when filled with air, and pop once it reaches a certain pressure. It was interesting because female condoms exploded in around thirty seconds, a substantially shorter time frame than that of males.
Once leaving this test, we went to another room, where the odor of condoms was being tested: someone was tasked with taking observations of the odor 90 days after it was manufactured, 120, 180, etcetera because users sometimes refrain from usage due to their bad smell after a certain period of time. In this same room, there were also refrigerators that monitored various contraceptives in different temperatures, allowing the scientists to see in what conditions they were still effective in, among other things.
This pretty much concluded our biological tour, and we were then handed over to a chemist to talk about the tests they go through. Although chemistry isn’t one of my favorite subject matters, I was immensely interested in the tests they use, from chromatography to dissolving tablets in a wide range of solvents. It was cool to see how the various tests went hand in hand, and how some of them preserved the tablet while others destroyed it. A rising problem is counterfeit, so one of the main jobs of these people is to ensure the tablet is composed of what the company (or manufacturer) says it is. They also utilize computer software to assist their data collection; for example, graphs are electronically drawn depicting a “peak” which serves as a means of comparison the standard pill.
All in all, this experience was really cool, and it was quite neat to see the long process each method goes through before it can be sent to the low-resource settings. I am excited to bring this knowledge to our projects and am sad our week has come to an end!
Day 4 – Bridgett Rogers and the Design Lab!
Today I got to shadow Bridgett Rogers, who works in DevOps (development operations), and I attended a meeting that discussed how to better streamline and implement Agile, as well as other organization-focused ways of thinking. The highlight of the day came at the end of the day, when I got to visit the Design Lab, which showcases a lot of products, the displayed versions of which never having made it to market. I was totally not allowed to take pictures in this area, apologies in advance. While I can’t go into specifics, I was able to see a model/mockup of the Lenovo Smart Speaker, as well as a custom built desktop designed for gaming. I also was referred to a company called User View, which does massive surveys with people who are interested in alpha/beta-testing products. I am very excited to put my name in with them!
I was also able to visit the data center, where all of Lenovo’s servers are kept. These are the servers that provide for the entire campus, as well as the other Morrisville campus, and even much of Lenovo’s Chinese and Asian operations! I entered in through a very secure, double locked entrance (not any old schmo can get in :D), and I got to take the full tour from the head of the data center, and learn all about the massive amounts of servers, and equally importantly, the massive amounts of power it takes to power them! These servers have to run for years at a time, with no down time, so it is very difficult to maintain them and ensure the length of their life. The room is always kept at 69 degrees so that they will never overheat and fail.
NOTE: Pictures will be included later tonight. Currently having issues transferring pics from phone to computer.
Day 4: A Protein more Stingy than Mr. Krabs
Today was national doughnut day. Per the laws of office jobs, someone brought in two dozen doughnuts and they all disappeared within a matter of minutes. You could probably model the amount of doughnuts in the break room with an exponential decay graph. I barely got half of a doughnut, but Dr. Masoudi and I had to carry on with our forlorn bellies. Our empty stomachs pretty much paralleled our experiment (which was fruitless). The electrophoresis analysis that we ran yesterday told us that we needed to start the entire protein-harvesting process all over again. Dr. Masoudi got out a new batch of E. Coli cells, introducing a bacterium to the flasks and keeping the containers in incubators. We also set up a protein-identifying process called a “Western” that creates a protein imprint on a membrane using an electric current – I have yet to see the results of this experiment. We ran a second electrophoresis experiment today as well, and we received a new and unexpected result. The gel that holds our data works by showing us the distribution of peptide chains based on molar mass. Yesterday, we assumed that the thickest, boldest line indicated our target protein, Nb6B9, even though its molar mass was a bit off. The new setup tells us something completely different; that thick, bold line was actually a contaminant that attached itself to our nickel resin during filtration and was never successfully washed out. In our new analysis, a faint second line pops up below a bolder line and is between the molar masses of 5,000 and 17,000 kiloDaltons (the first and second notches) – this line better matches Nb6B9 which is approximately 12,000 kDa. The new trial has pretty much dispelled our previous preconception that the bold line was our target protein, supporting the idea that our filtration methods resulted in an unsatisfactory percent yield.
Besides this bad news, the rest of the day went pretty well. I’m getting to know everyone in the lab a bit better, and I’ve even observed some other chemists setting up X-ray crystallography. In this practice, proteins are crystallized for stability and X-rays are shot at the configurations to create images of the crystallized structures. Hopefully Dr. Masoudi and I will soon get the chance to crystallize and examine our stingy Nb6B9 protein when its attached to a cell receptor (if the protein ever decides to cooperate). Fingers crossed!
Here’s an end-of-the-week haiku:
Insect receptors
Patiently wait for stingy
Nb6B9
Day 4: Analyzing Some Results
Today we completed a third day of stability tests at Integrated Lab Solutions. So far, we had done a standard test (same day analyzing), one after 24 hours, and today we set up the test for 48 hours (after the sample was taken). Additionally the past two days we had messed around with the pH of samples so that they could continue the stability tests in different environments in the future. But today, after we (Ben, Chief Scientist, and I) set up the day 3 trial of the long term stability test, we got to take a look at some of the results that they got yesterday afternoon from the 24 hour trial. One of the other lab technicians had spent the morning reviewing and finalizing the results so that we could compare them to the results from day 1. While looking at the two sets of data, we noticed an increase in detected concentration of almost all of the drugs from day 1 to day 2. Only a few had decreased and when they did decrease it was much less significant than those that increased. Noticing this pattern, we made a joint spreadsheet with both sets of data and programmed the spreadsheet with equations to tell us the % difference from day 1 to day 2. Some of the detected concentrations increased by as much as 50%! Unfortunately, even though I got to program the LCMS-MS to read out day 3 samples, the results were not available by the time that I left ILS. Luckily, Ben said that he would send me the final results of the study when the data was retrieved with a discussion of all of the results. I look forward to hearing about the end of this experiment, and enjoyed my time at Integrated Lab Solutions.