Today was the last day and it was the day we presented our pitches. Every single person had a different and unique presentation pitching on why CA should buy this product. Most interestingly, no one really overlapped with each other, making it even more unique. We all are very appreciative of Tracy, our leader for CISCO and all the effort she made to get us in important meetings and into our projects as well.
Today i worked with people in my WEP and outside to learn issues with my project. They all seemed to find the map a little bland and lacking character. This led to map changes for the rest of the day and continuing to make a lake, a forest, and ambient fog. These many things took such a long time due to the old CPU and cause lighting to be faulty as the engine needed to continue to update it as a added to the map. Here is one of the people who reviewed my project.
Today, after our wrap-up, Dr. Laber talked to us about his push to make relatively cheap education available to a wide range of people. He wants to create courses that go much deeper than current online resources like Coursera, allowing people to get a PhD-level education online. Dr. Laber believes that those looking only for education shouldn’t be forced to pay exorbitant tuition just to get a job. This set of courses would be achieved through amazon and panels of professors to find the information that needs to be taught and the best way to teach it. Due to the wide availability of such a resource, the costs can be kept low enough that anyone can learn (ex. $50). As most high level jobs require college degrees these days, it’s imperative that such an education can be given to a greater audience. 
On Tuesday and Wednesday, Mrs. Yates’ team preformed tests on the two machines that we had discussed last Monday. Unfortunately, someone on her team did not order the staining plates to test the quantum reader, so they were only able to test the incubator.
(temperature probe attached to computer)
The incubator tests are done in 2 phases. The first phase is the empty phase where the only insert a temperature probe to be sure the temperature is uniform throughout the test and does not waiver. The second phase is the full test where her team will put cell culture dishes full of water (instead of media) into the incubator. These culture dishes have to be labeled with what they contain, the date, and Mrs. Yate (or the project supervisor’s) initials for the safety of everyone in the lab. To be sure temperature is constant, they will insert temperature probes into the water in the media plates and just laying inside the incubator. Once the incubator has run for 24 hours, everything is taken out and the temperature probes are hooked up to a system that will plot the data in a graph that shows temperature vs time (the same as phase 1). This will indicate if the temperature was consistent and if the incubator passed the test.
Today I met with Dr. Thuesen from Guilford college to discuss her life as a historian. Dr. Thuesen emphasized from the beginning that all historians jobs are different especially professors. She wanted me to understand that different schools will have different goals and requirements for their teachers. Guilford college, for example, focuses more on teaching and mentoring students, whereas UNC, a research institution, wants teachers to be able to put out material and books more. When she first went to college she wanted to go into Biology but she realized that she enjoyed researching through books and not in the laboratory. Dr. Thuesen gave me a lot of insight about keeping my mind open in college and taking unique courses in order to get a wider range of experience not just in history. When she was in college she made sure to use her connections with professors to help take advantage of her time there to help her once she got out of her PhD. I will make sure to keep these notes I took with me so can look back on all of the advice and recommendations from the historians I met with.
Today was the last day and our capstone was a pitch competition, or really just a pitch exhibition, where we all presented the pitches on the different Cisco architectures we chose. There were pitches from products like Meraki to WebEx, and it was very nice to see each person’s presentation. There were a myriad of different approaches to the topic, from side by side comparisons to heavy contextualization. The project was a fitting and satisfying end to our time at Cisco.
-Price
We got the whole day to work on our pitch presentation. My presentation will be on Cisco Enterprise, a series of network solutions designed to improve business networks in the areas of reliability, efficiency, security, and ease of use. I also met with my mentor to talk about the pitch and I met with someone else at Cisco to grow my network.
-Price
Today I met with Dr. Fountain from Meredith University and discussed his experiences of being a historian. Dr. Fountain grew up in Florida being involved with the church and the ideals of the Confederacy. He went to college under the pressure from his family to become a pastor but realized it wasn’t the right place for him. He took his interest in discovering new information and knowledge to become a history major. He continued his love for religion to focus on religion in slave communities and the different interactions between them. He wanted to bring to light the struggles and hardships experienced by enslaved people and how they used religion to cope and resist. Dr. Fountain gave me a lot of insightful information about getting into college and eventually grad school. He told me a story about how he was denied from his dream school – Kentucky- because he didn’t research the professors there. Dr. Fountain was one of my favorite historians to talk to and I look forward to catching up with him soon.
Today I met with Ms. Umfleet from the NC Department of Natural and Cultural Resources. Her job mostly entails working with different museums around the state to commemorate events important to NC history. She told me how she enjoys playing a Jeopardy like game with people she meets from different places from NC. She specializes in the Wilmington Massacre which is getting more national attention since the Black Lives Matter movement. She emphasized the need for the state to teach young people about these events in order to raise awareness and empathy. She also told me about how out of college she had a hard time finding a job because of how competitive the history job sector is. The most important advice I got from Ms. Umfleet was that you work in history because you love it not because it pays well.
Yesterday, I spent most of my day commenting on my code and play-testing our model.
Since I added a lot of new bits of code to the existing code, I had to add comments so that anyone who looks at my code in the future will be able to easily understand it.
I then began play-testing our model in both the web-based version of NetLogo and the offline version. Basically, I was trying to find conditions that would yield “interesting” scenarios like the bacteria overpopulating or the fungi overpopulating.
Here’s a version where the bacteria overpopulate–the bacteria is all the green stuff, by the way.
And here’s a version where the fungi overpopulate–the fungi is the dark blue stuff.
