Rosie

June 13th, 2019

The first week was largely quiet for me at Sandia. The first three days were spent talking to the IT services trying to get my computer up and running, installing MATLAB, getting MATLAB to run, etc. By the end of the third day I was at Sandia, I successfully had MATLAB installed and on the morning of day four, it was ready to run, which meant that I could move on to the actual task for the week: calculating the energy carried by a grout-filled basketball falling through air (with appropriate consideration of air resistance) before landing directly below its original location. While this doesn’t sound like a great achievement (in fact we had very similar exercises in my Computational Physics class I took my freshman year of college), it was a big improvement on dealing with IT issues.

The good news about having computer issues and being on hold with IT for several hours? Plenty of time to consider what I want to accomplish this summer!

I can divide my goals into three different categories: Short term (first third of the summer), Moderate term (middle third of the summer), and Long term (last third of the summer and beyond).

Short term goals:

• Refamiliarize myself with MATLAB- this shouldn’t take too long since I do have experience with it. I’ll when I have succeeded since it will mean not needing to spend extra time digging through the manual pages
• Finish background reading on my project so I can have a solid foundation for what I am doing this summer
• Learn to use the Albuquerque bus system to go places other than work-I’ll admit, this isn’t a science goal, but it is an important one for me nonetheless.

Moderate term goals:

• Learn to use ObsPy (python codes for working with seismic data)
• Make some simple plots of the microseismicity we are observing-this would go with the first since I will probably need some of the tools in ObsPy to be able to make the files we would need to make plots in GMT or other plotting software
• Begin AGU abstract or at very least determining what kind of material would go in it

Long term goals:

• Put together figures, graphs, and maps that illustrate the microseismicity observed in our dataset
• Submit AGU abstract and have all needed content to make an AGU poster or presentation
• Consider based on my experience this summer, whether working at a National Lab is something I want to pursue in the future

Outside of work, I have discovered a couple things about Albuquerque. 1) You get looked at really strangely in the local Mexican restaurant when you make a mess while eating a sopapilla. I am from the Midwest and can count on one hand the number of times I have even attempted to eat a sopapilla, so it wasn’t surprising to me that I made a mess with the honey. How people eat those things without making a mess is what I want to know. 2) It is really easy to tell which direction you are going because the mountains are to the east. As long as you can see them, you are going to be able to figure out which direction you are going.