Wednesday again! So it’s just a week later than planned this time.

Well, I did not write an entry last week because I was so very busy. This was for two very good reasons though. The first one is one of the best parts about working at Lockheed: ‘Flex Time.’ This means that I have to do my 40 hours of work each week, but I can decide when I want to do them. I worked for 11 hours on Tuesday and Wednesday and 10 more on Thursday along with the eight vacation hours from Memorial Day on Monday to complete my work time and take off Friday.

Now I didn’t take off Friday just to go to the beach. I actually went down to Ft. Lauderdale on Thursday night for the American Geophysical Union Spring Conference. The professor I work for, her advisor, and I went to the conference to observe and present (I just observed) several posters and talks on current research in the field of Space Physics; more specifically the Earth’s magnetosphere, which is what I am studying.

The best part about this was that Embry-Riddle’s Physical Sciences department sponsored me and covered the convention attendance and hotel costs. Having opportunities like this and still being an undergraduate student has pretty much convinced me that I have chosen the best major possible.

I was also able to meet researchers in the field from London, Germany, Finland, Alaska, and Japan. The only hard part was having to derail my brain from all the engineering I had been doing and get back into the physics. It was definitely fun though.

In other news, work has been going well. I have been setting up a lot of programs and models to simulate vehicle controls from some computational fluid dynamics data. There was also a ‘lunch and learn’ today where anyone from the site who wants to can go to a class during their lunch break. Today’s class was all about how to appropriately use scale models and relate small models to different fluid viscosities and pressure.

I also got home later than usual today because we had an intern dinner at the Cheesecake Factory. There are several more interns now from other colleges and even a few from a local high school starting on Monday. At dinner there were ten of us, including the Human Resources contact, Paula. This was an ‘official’ internship event which meant the bill was covered and everyone got cheesecake!

The bed is calling me and I must prepare for the rest of my week and hopefully some scuba diving this weekend.

Have fun!