extreme environments | My Life @ Riddle

This week I felt very close to home with the technical seminar we had this week at work. The guy presenting talked about using gloves to communicate in extreme environments. My research at ERAU has to do with testing usability of space suit gloves. On top of that, I am the president of the Human Performance in Extreme Environments club on campus. It is amazing that I saw a presentation combining both of those areas from work they are doing here at SPAWAR. Since this project was ongoing, it leaves me with a desire to come back and work with this team. So, I talked to the guy presenting and gave him my information. Hopefully, this leads to some cool work opportunities in the future.

I was welcomed this weekend by some other Embry-Riddle students. There was a competition this week at SPAWAR for robot submarine vehicles. There is a giant pool-like structure that can be used for testing these vehicles. High school and college students from all over came to test and compete with their vehicle designs. There was an EMBRY-RIDDLE TEAM! They were from the Daytona Beach campus, too! I was very proud to see my university being represented at a competition with other highly respected schools. You go ERAU RoboSub Team!

I am moving to the end of my internship. Only 3 more weeks until I fly back to Florida and begin my final semester at ERAU. I can’t believe that I was walking down Doolittle hall to my dorm room 3 years ago. I remember everything very clearly. My first impression of ERAU was vastly different from how I see it today. At first, I felt out of place and insecure living with people I had never met before. It didn’t take long for that to change, and now I feel more at home here than anywhere else I have lived. Living on this planet for 21 years, and having moved to many different places, that is saying something!

I wrote the final paper for my internship and turned it in early this week. I cannot believe I was coming in for landing 4 months ago wondering what my internship would be like, where I’d be living, and who I would meet. Now I am summing that all up into 5 pages and handing it back to school. I wouldn’t say this internship went by fast, but I definitely made the most of my time here. The internship gave me a chance to learn a lot and explore my field, but outside of it, I was exploring a new city and trying things I may never have the chance to do again. It’s important to say yes to as much as you can, because in the end you will see your experience as a successful one.

My final paper almost finished

One of the first people I met at my internship is Christian. Although he annoys me like there is no tomorrow and is essentially my adopted, pesky brother, he is one of the most important people I met here. He has helped me with my work and guided me through a major project, introduced me to a great program for new employees, and has invited me to every get together he hosts. He introduced me to his girlfriend, Desiree, who also became a great friend. We actually went on a “girl date night” this Thursday. She invited her friend and I invited my fellow intern, Brittany. We all went out and painted pottery. It was so much fun that Brittany and I went out the next night to do it again. It is relaxing, but it also gave us the chance to make going away gifts for the people we have grown to adore here. I made a cup for my mentor and a plate for Christian and Desiree.

Desiree, Brittany, and me

For my boss 🙂

She likes flamingos!

A llama painting for my friends.. that’s not weird at all

This week was Brittany’s birthday. She turned 21 on Sunday and I definitely had to make a fun day for her. On Friday, I baked cupcakes for work since we were having a branch meeting. The night before I had made the discovery that we did not have a muffin pan. So I poured the batter into cake cups and laid them out on a flat pan. I was assuming they would hold up ok. I assumed wrong. The cups spread out making the cupcakes shape into this weird oblong figure that looked like the elliptical path the Earth makes around the Sun. So I told my coworkers it was this new style or that I got them from the bakery and they bought cool, new pans. They all picked up a cupcake, gave me a dirty look, and walked away. It doesn’t matter how it looks, because everyone loved them and they tasted great! Brittany was happy someone remembered her birthday, especially someone like me!

We celebrated her birthday by taking a tour of a brewery up north, drinking her first beer, and taking her first sip of wine. She hated it. Not really surprised there. Stone Brewery is famous in San Diego. During Comic Con, they had Wil Wheaton, Drew Curtis, and Stone creator Greg Koch get together to brew their own beer creation. If you are just turning 21, it would be the best place to try your first taste of beer. But you will hate it the first time you taste it. Afterwards, I took her and her fiancé, Jeff to Outback so she could eat and try a mixed drink. That was not very tasty to her either, though. For many people, a 21^st birthday is both the best and worst day of their life. Be warned, and be careful!

First time getting ID’ed. She was very excited

Trying out horrible tasting drinks 🙂

How they brew

The end of the tour.. it was hot!

The extra fluff gets poured out into this big bucket

This weekend I had brunch with my roommate and her brother. We got to see the area he just recently moved to and planned out a fun night for us to use the amenities. He moved to an apartment with a pool, fire pits, and a view of the bay. So we will have the roommates and friends get together before I leave for Florida for s’mores and fireworks. I also went with them to shop in an area close by called Old Town. There was a Mexican market going on this weekend, so I was able to pick up a few gifts for my siblings and mom. Everything there was so colorful and hand-crafted. It’s much nicer than sending them a “Wish you were here” postcard.

Old Town

An old hotel bar

After that I went to my friend, Christian’s barbecue. It was supposed to be a fun picnic outside, but the clouds that day decided they would rain for the first time in 4 months. What good timing; thank you sky, you are so considerate. That’s the only thing that bugs me about San Diego. On the days I have to push my bike up a mountain to get to work, it is sunny and in the high 70’s. On the weekends when I would like to be outside, it is cold and cloudy… or raining apparently. That didn’t bother us because we just packed all of us into his small apartment and played games. And the food was glorious! There were bacon wrapped peppers and sliced peaches. I made mini cupcakes which were gone 5 minutes after being on the counter. At least they were better than the orbit cupcakes I made earlier this week.

RAIN?!!?

Corgi! I almost stole it

Playing games at the Barbecue

On Sunday night, my roommate and I had dinner and watched “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” It was a pretty good way to start off the week, because inspiring movies tend to leave you more productive. However, I woke up that Monday just as lazy and cranky as every other day. That attitude changed when I heard news that my favorite formula 1 driver, Michael Schumacher, had come out of a coma. This past December, Schumacher was put into a medically induced coma after a skiing accident. He remained in that state for 6 months. About a week ago I was checking up on him only to find news stories that people “should not expect a recovery” or that “there is no way he would come back if he hadn’t already.” I was so happy to find that he was awake and being transferred to a therapy hospital.

What a great way to start off the week! I was very productive at work, only in the mornings, though. This week I organized and designed a website. I had never done something like this in my classes at Embry-Riddle. I was told exactly how to design it by the engineer. Naturally, as a Human Factors engineer, I ignored everything he said and designed it the way I thought would make sense to the users. This was a hard task as I was never clearly told who the users would be. This past semester, I had a professor who would assign projects and would never really tell us what the end deliverable should be or look like. I could not stand that! That was my least favorite instructor because I was never quite sure what I was supposed to be doing. I have a newfound appreciation for that professor, though. I finally understand that technique because it seems to be the same way the government assigns work. So, an annoying class ended up preparing me the most for the real-world.

I showed one of my advisors the designs for the website and he said it looked good. The next step is to send it to the computer engineers and have them do the programming. Luckily, I am friends with the person that will be writing the code, and he can deal with my obsessive-compulsive nature. That’s why it’s important to be nice to absolutely everyone you meet! Because you may, and will probably, end up asking them for favors somewhere down the road. So the projects for this week at my internship went well… once I worked up the motivation to start moving! I just need someone to throw a bucket of cold water on me in the afternoons and remind me to stop procrastinating.

During my free time at work, I was helping a fellow student and professor in selecting people for a research project. For the past two years I have been involved with a club on campus called Human Performance in Extreme Environments. I was recently elected as the president of the club and have been coming up with activities for the members to do. The purpose of this club is to study how people live and work in extreme environments, like: space, underwater, or in extreme heat/cold. This allows the club members to do really cool things and create studies about it. For example, some of the upcoming events for the fall include: learning to surf, going to the Kennedy Space Center, and swimming at Blue Springs. We are looking to raise money to give some of our team members a chance to go skydiving. However, some of our members were just selected to do something much more extreme.

Sometime in the next year, our members will live and do research at a place called the Mars Desert Research Station in the Utah desert. Here, a crew of 7 undergraduate students will live in a confined habitat about the size of a living space that would be on the first rocket to Mars. For these two weeks they do behavioral research seeing how different people are affected by the confinement and isolation from society. This living space is about 30 minutes from any sign of civilization. This gives them plenty of room to do something called EVAs where they dress in a full spacesuit mock-up and walk around outside to collect rocks and other samples from the land. Everything here is very limited, just like it would be on Mars. So, the water tank inside needs to be constantly filled up, leaving each person to take a 1-2 minute shower every 3-4 days. There is limited cell phone service, and the only contact you have is with a team of individuals called “mission support” through e-mail.

Walking out on the Extravehicular Activities (EVAs)

Walking on “EVAs” in the full suit

The first ERAU crew to go to the Mars Desert Research Station.. oh! and their advisor Dr. Jason Kring

So, I spent a few days this week helping select the members that will go on this trip. I went on the very first Embry-Riddle team to go, and was supposed to go on again this past December, but I got very sick a few days before we were scheduled to leave. This new team has never been to this research station before, so there is a lot of planning and training to be done. I am very excited to see what kind of research they will be doing there.

The MDRS living habitat in the middle of nowhere

On the way to the isolated habitat

After planning a few things for that team, I was basically done with all the work for projects at my internship and at ERAU. It was a very long, but rewarding week. I spent Friday night at a baseball game with my roommate and some friends from work. We drove downtown to Petco Stadium to see the Los Angeles Dodgers play the San Diego Padres. I loved watching the game, but I’m not entirely sure who won. Yes, I am awful with sports. I couldn’t even read the score board properly. The only thing that matters to me is if the guys playing are handsome. Which they were, hence why I don’t know the final score. The rest of the weekend I stayed home and wrote up a few papers for home. It was generally uneventful, but that was needed since next week is going to be horrific!!!

Padres vs. Dodgers game

My Life @ Riddle

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Tag Archives: extreme environments

Closing Things Up

Procrastinati… oh, I’ll finish that later