Day 5 – Page 3 – CA Work Experience Program

Day 5: Grease and The Greenhouse

Today was the beginning of a new adventure, marking the start of my week at Louis Cherry Architecture in downtown Raleigh. I was so excited to get out into the community and immerse myself in the life of an architect! Louis Cherry Architecture is run by Louis Cherry, along with 5 other architects/designers. My two highlights from the day were visiting a site and shadowing a meeting with a mechanical engineer and drafting a greenhouse for one of LCA’s (Louis Cherry Architecture’s) current projects. At the meeting, I was able to check out the site of a future restaurant, where I also experienced the importance of problem solving. In this scenario, the restaurant to be was a very small space, and in order for it to pass certain regulations, there must be a ‘grease trap’ to prevent kitchen and food grease from getting into the sewage systems. The challenge with this is the grease trap is roughly 4x2x2 feet, so with such limited space (yep, the space in the pictures is all they have!), where would this grease trap go? A lot of times, what takes the most time in an architecture project is the problem solving to make it a reality; design is not the only thing required for a successful project. When I was researching greenhouse precedents, I was mostly looking for how to bring a modern aspect into the structure, as greenhouses often learn towards the traditional side. The project that this greenhouse corresponded with, “The Pool House”, is an ongoing residential project with a very modern and clean feel. For the second half of the day, I practiced using SketchUp and began to draft a model of the greenhouse I designed. Below are photographs of the restaurant site (located on Person St. next to Crawford and Sons), my workspace, and my work-in-progress a.k.a. the greenhouse.

Day 5- Tape machines and more mixing

Today we started out day a little bit later at 1:00 pm because Mr. Hodgen had to take his son to the hospital for a pre-op checkup. Even with the late start, I still did a lot of interesting and cool things today. I learned how to wind tape, meaning how to set it up in the machine properly and how to rewind as well as record over it.

day 5 band or tape-1mvp2r6

Tape machines are a very cool resource that not a lot of studios have today because digital recording has taken over a lot. However, they are good to have because they give songs a nice warm sound to them. I also learned that before digital editing, someone would have to literally cut off pieces of the tape in order to make edits to the song, which is an irreversible action. (Lots of pressure to do things right!)

It also fully learned what mastering a song is. Mixing a song is adding in effects and editing out parts that are not wanted. Mastering music means that the song volume is raised to a commercial level, so that the volume of your song wouldn’t be drastically different from another song that played on the same speakers. Mastering music also involves looking at an entire album or group of songs and ensuring that al the songs are just about the same volume level.

The difference in mastering a song makes the difference in how people will hear the song.

Later in the day, three guys came in who are members of a band called five nine. They play what I would define is alternative rock kind of music. Anyways it was cool stuff! And Mr. Hodgen worked with them as he mixed their music.

day five band-wfc7hj

Day 5 – WRAL

Today I shadowed Ms. Amanda Lamb at WRAL. She is a reporter for the network and spends her days very busy. We started the day by going to the courthouse in downtown Raleigh to look through arrest warrants in search of any new, big stories. After finding very little, we ran into an activist working on the Kyron Hinton case. Ms. Lamb was able to get the activist to do an interview regarding the story right there; it was simply luck that we ran into her. After interviewing a couple people outside the courthouse, we then drove over to the possible address of Hinton himself. When on the site, the atmosphere was shifty to say the least. I, thankfully, stayed in the car and observed. Ms. Lamb and Jamie (the photographer) hopped out and went down the street talking to people regarding the incident with Hinton. Even with all the shady behavior happening all around, the people were friendly and willing to help the reporters. After getting shots of the street and people there, we headed to get lunch and go to the Sheriffs Department. There they interviewed the sheriff about the case and discussed his opinions on the incident at hand. After collecting all the video, we headed back to the station where Ms. Lamb put together her shows and planned what to say. She then aired at 4, 5, and 6 o’clock. It was a crazy and hectic day, but I had tons of fun!

Day 5 at USA baseball!

Today was such a cool day. Jonathan and I made our way to the USA baseball offices around 9:30. This is different than the USA baseball complex, but they are currently working on moving the offices to be at the complex. We then met Brittany, who is the marketing assistant director for USA baseball. Brittany primarily works with the host family program that USA baseball offers, a program where a family has the chance to host a rising baseball star from all over the world for a week. She showed us around the office, showing us famous trophies from over the years and introducing us to people in the office such as the CEO and finance director and i️nterns who are spending there summer working for USA baseball. Brittany then explained to us her background, how she was actually an intern that turned into the job that she has today. Brittany gave us many tasks throughout the day. Our first task was to make folders that would be given out to the national women’s team, as they have their identification process this coming weekend. This i️ncluded papers where players filled out their names, travel forms, medical forms and sorted and copied all of these into 50 folders. We then stuck labels onto all of these as well. After this, we were given a box of lanyards and had to label them with the names of the host family. This program happens very soon so most of what was going on in the office had to do with this. After this, we put together another folder filled with information that needed to go to the host family. This i️ncluded the schedule for the time and other general guidelines that the host family had to know. As we were working, i️t was very i️ntersting to hear the conversations that we’re going on in the office. There were conversations from the basketball game last night to how to best edit a picture for a pamphlet given out at a game. This was really cool to hear and I’m glad we were able to spend the day here.

SAS Day 5 – Data and Graphs

Today started as usual at 10:00 o’clock in building Q with all of the CA students. Once we all arrived we went to a conference room where Elliot, a data scientist, helped us all set up student accounts for the SAS software. After that Elliot gave us some background on what a data scientist does and what he likes about his job. After that, we all loaded up SAS studio, software that allows you to program stuff. Even though I have no programming experience Elliot was still able to teach me and all the other CA students how to do some basic programming and code. This was really fun for me because it was very hands-on and I learned a little bit about programming and coding which I thought would very hard but in reality, it wasn’t that bad. Next, we headed to building T for lunch. As usual, the lunch was really good. After lunch, we headed back to Building Q to learn about Visual analytics. First, we had Elliot and his co-worker teach us a little bit about visual analytics. Then they walked us through a couple of examples and taught us how to make our own reports. After that, they set us free and allowed us to make our own visualizations and reports. This was really exciting because I got to see how data scientist create pretty reports to talk about patterns in data. Overall I would have to say that today has been one of my favorite days because it was very hands-on and I got to create my own reports. I am looking forward to tomorrow in finance.

Day Five – Gaining Independence and New Accomplishments

After a nice restful weekend, I was ready for day five. Today I worked with Dr. Todd at CA. She had some of the proteins I was working on with Dr. Bermek. With Dr. Bermek I had been working with the protein UL8. Dr. Todd had different variants of the protein like UL30. We ran a protein gel with samples sent over from UNC to check them and see if they were clean samples. With Dr. Todd watching, I set up the Tetra gel box and gel apparatus ALL BY MYSELF (I was very proud to put my new skills to use). The only thing different was this time is instead of putting a plastic dam parallel to the gel, I put another gel opposite to the first gel because we needed two to fit all the samples. Once the gels were out of the refrigerator, I opened them, tore off the plastic on the bottom, removed the comb, put the gel very tight against the gasket, aligned the red and black stickers to the red and black on the gel box, poured the buffer in the between the gels, checked if it was leaking, poured the rest of the buffer into the box, and then just like that I had set up my first gel box all by myself. Once I finished my minor accomplishment, I prepared the samples. I added 4uL of 10x loading dye to each tube. This took quite a while because there were 16 samples. Then, I added 12 uL of each sample to the each tube that already had loading dye in it. After that, I put the samples in a hot water bath at 95 degrees Celsius for five minutes. Once the samples were nice and toasty, it was time to load them in the gels. Loading gels is very tricky, so I was quite nervous for this step. I didn’t want to mess anything up that would contaminate other wells because I didn’t want to re-prepare all 16 samples or cause any extra steps for Dr. Todd. Since Dr. Todd and Dr. Bermek’s gel setup was a little different, Dr. Todd showed me how to load by demonstrating on the first two lanes. I did much better loading the gel this time since I had a little bit more practice and the pipette tips were much narrower making the placement easier. I didn’t poke the gel, and each sample went into the correct lane. Just like preparing the samples, this process was very time consuming and intricate. Once I loaded all the lanes, I turned on the electric current and let the gel run for 50 minutes.

In the meantime, I helped Dr. Todd with some lab work that needed to be prepared for next year’s Biotech class. I helped organize, hole punch, and sort a list of all the primers that had already been designed with all the information about them. Then, I labeled tube after tube with the primer name and whether it was a forward or reverse primer. Each primer needed to have duplicates, so there were a lot of tubes. Once I had finished labeling the tubes, I pipetted 30 uL from the stock primers into the new labeled tube. This process was very tedious because there were a lot of caps to unscrew and a lot of pipette tip changes, but I was happy to be able to help Dr. Todd out. Once, I had finished, Dr. Todd gave me the good news that the protein gel worked out. We had no idea what the samples were like, so she was excited that they showed up on the gel. I was excited because I completed the whole process of running a gel by myself. I prepared the samples, prepared the gel box, loaded the samples, and ran the gel. It was a day full of firsts and new accomplishments.

Today was less hectic than the others days of the WEP because there were not four or five experiments going on like at UNC. It was nice to have a slower day, but I’m excited to return to the UNC Lineberger Cancer Center tomorrow for an action packed day full of new lessons and experiences.

All the samples I prepared to load into the protein gel.

The finished stained protein gel.

The Tetra gel box I set up all by myself with gels on both sides.

The gel loaded with samples.

All the tubes I labeled and added 30 uL of primers too.

Day Five – 6/4

Today, we came in and met with Dr. Laber in the conference room first thing…surprise surprise! With more calculus, I remained very lost on most of the equations and computational facts about statistics he put up on the board. After struggling to understand some of the terms, we got free donuts along with the rest of the office and he gave us a statistics problem to solve on our own. To my own disbelief, we got it RIGHT! After not understanding the majority of the morning lessons we had been having, getting something right and beginning to grasp a concept was fabulous. Of course our explanation was not even close to the one that Dr. Laber showed us a statistician would have used to get the same answer…but still the right answer! The former Dean of the Statistics Department at NC State then came and talked to us. We talked a lot about the college process since he has worked on the executive boards of multiple universities and currently is the Dean of Statistics at Oregon State. He has a daughter who is the same age as me, so he could relate to exactly where we were at students at the moment which was a refreshing point of view in the department! After this, we met with Brian who was another member in the Statistics Department. He told us about fascinating projects he had done, how he got into statistics, and kind of his story to where he is now. It was really neat hearing the point of view of someone who truly had the perspective that people like Luke and I could do projects like the complicated dust spatial problems which made it onto a CSI episode! He believed that the concepts were simpler than they seem…but I agree to disagree. We went and ate some lunch and then met Ryan Martin, one of the most published Statisticians in the country who also is in the Stats Department at NC State after lunch. He told us about the two main methods of statics, the classical method and the Bayesian method. The really neat thing, was that he had created Inferential Models, a third method which he hoped would spread nationally through teachings and the book he published to become one of the three main methods of statistics. He had a really interesting perspective being the only person we had talked to thus far who enjoyed the statistics for the pure math and less so for the applications. Overall, meeting all of these new people was eye-opening and tomorrow we are planning to help out with a project in the Bureau of Mines with graduate students again.

Day 5 – Intro to Tergus and Drug Formulation

This week, we’ll be interning at Tergus Pharma, a company focusing on the development of topical treatments. After arriving, we sat down with Duffy McDonald and Wendy Ward from the Human Resources Department; they helped introduce us to Tergus by providing some background on the history of the company as well as on their own journeys to their current positions. Then, we went on a tour of all the labs and offices in the building with Chris and Michael, who work with operations and facilities; a few of the labs included equipment that we also encountered last week at Integrated Pain Solutions, including HPLC and mass spectrometers. Afterwards, we were given a presentation by Avinash, who works on the business side of the company. We learned about the drug development cycle, from discovery and development to FDA post-market safety monitoring, along with exploring the different aspects of testing treatments during the development stage.

We will be learning more about these steps of drug development in chronological order throughout this week. This afternoon, Srikanth, one of the scientists, brought us to the labs to teach us about formulation. He first demonstrated how to create a hydrogel by combining water, sorbitol, sodium hydroxide as a neutralizer, glycerin, and the gelling agent carbopol 980 in a small mechanical stirrer. While waiting for the ingredients to mix together, he also discussed creating creams and testing mixtures with HPLC, microscopes, texture analyzers, viscometers, pH meters and rheometers. Altogether, we covered a lot of information today, and I’m looking forward to the week to come!

Day Five: (The Raleigh) Times & Transportation

Day five was sure different from the rest! First of all, Ivan and I were assigned to work together at the NCDOT (North Carolina Department of Transportation) on this day, as Mondays are slow around the legislative office. This is because technically, our NC Senate and House operate part-time, so the first time they come in on Mondays is around 6 or 7 pm! Wow, it would sure be awesome to have that same system at CA…. oh well.

We first started our day at 10am, which was a plus from the get-go. We then met with one of our two hosts, Deans Eatman. He is a youngblood in his department, as he is only 23 and he absolutely refuses to be referred to as “Sir”. He also doesn’t wear socks, which Ivan found quite strange. We spent a while in his office, asking questions about the department, the budget, and all sorts of other juicy gossip of that nature. Deans then declared that he was hungry, as he hadn’t eaten breakfast, and off to our first meal we went! Ivan got just apple juice, I got just iced coffee, and Deans got a nice biscuit.

After our lovely repose in the coffee shop, Ivan and I sat down with Mrs. Joy Hicks for the first time. Her job is quite numbers heavy, and some of the terms she threw around (expenditure, contractionary, fiscal, discretionary) made me glad that I took Econ with RJ! We spoke for about an hour, and then we all went out to lunch!

After lunch, Deans took Ivan and I over to the LOB (Legislative Office Building), where there were a couple protests going on within the building. Quite a few brave citizens took to the office of their representatives to exercise their first amendment rights, and by the noise level, most definitely their loudest voices too.

All in all, it was a very interesting and rewarding day! I enjoyed spending time with our new friends over at the DOT, and of course also with Ivan.

Day 5 – Carolina Ear and Hearing Clinic

Today we moved to a different location- Carolina Ear and Hearing Clinic and we observed Dr. McElveen. He was in his clinic today seeing patients. He saw many patients – as soon as he would finish with one he immediately moved to the next room. He saw patients until 12:30 when he took a lunch break. Dr. McElveen was off until 2:00, when he started seeing patients again until 5:00. In the afternoon, Nell and I learned how to patient history, symptoms, and learned how to present. This was very exciting and lots of fun to learn.

No pictures could be obtained today due to privacy violations.