Day V: The King and the VP Department

My day began excellently, and continued as such. The reason? Free food, of course! Actually, there was a lot of free food today. It all began in the morning meeting. Bob brought us two big boxes of doughnuts! I had two. They were excellent. It was fortunate I did so, because immediately after we arrived in the lab, Bob and Joe came to collect some 'volunteers' to help them move an old optical measuring bench from a lab on the third floor to display in the lobby. I though, 'Oh, just moving some pieces of equipment...shouldn't be hard.'

Boy, was I wrong.

This bench was actually eight feet long and made of solid steel. It was also resting on two granite blocks that make it extremely stable and accurate. I guess in the world of lasers 'stable and accurate' translate to 'huge and heavy', because it took the four of us plus Tom and Kevin to even lift the bench off of the granite blocks. We got it downstairs without issue, but then we had to move the blocks. Thankfully, we had a dolly-type thing that could hold them both. Maneuvering them into place was a bit difficult, but we got them down eventually. So yeah, now the CIS lobby has a new addition. Hope you enjoy it.

Also at the staff meeting, we were given a homework assignment. We were tasked to go to the 'Student Opportunities' board and, assuming we possessed all the qualifications, choose a job we would be interested in applying for. I chose a position as a polymer chemist. This is interesting to me because I loved chemistry since I first began the course last year, and as I've looked at different majors and programs I've discovered an interest in ChemE and Materials Science. This looks like it could be pretty close to that type of work, but the description of duties was a bit slim. 

On that same note, I heard today that RIT has approved a Chemical Engineering program! This is excellent news if they can get it accredited and open to admission by the time I need to make a choice of majors...I'm extremely interested in ChemE, and RIT is the only one of my top 4 colleges that doesn't have it.

Jeff was in today, and when we went back to the lab I asked him if he had a spare key so we wouldn't have to bother Leanne or Jon to let us into the lab all the time. He only had one extra copy, so he said he'd give it to the most responsible person. Everyone pointed at me. It was pretty funny. Now we've got unrestricted access, I suppose. The key also opens the Room of Doom, which houses the most powerful of the eye-tracking systems in the building. Of course, this also means it is the most valuable. To give you an idea, this is one of four such machines in the world, and only one man on the entire planet knows how to fix it. Needless to say, we don't even look at the door funny. In keeping with the VP Mantra: "It's the only one we have and it's really expensive, so don't break it."

Soon after, we took turns coding the Interaction pilot tape. It was slow going, and we didn't finish it before heading over to the VP lab meeting at 10:30. That was an interesting experience. Jeff spent a bit of time discussing projects with the actual students/grads, then we moved on to our discussion of the upcoming 'boot camp'. This is their term for the two days where we have an intense series of classroom-style discussions to get us somewhat aware of the terminology and basic background knowledge that we'll need to have in order to help them in more ways than just the basic grunt work that we've been doing this week. That said, we'll also be planning, conducting, and studying the results of our own eyetracking experiment. The one I have planned involves placing the 007 unit or possibly the new digital model (if they get it fixed) on one or several bikers and watching how they observe the world around them as they ride. Seeing as there is a wide variety of people already participating in weekly bike rides, I should have a fairly large subject pool to work from. It looks like it'll be fun! (But it also looks like a lot more coding. I need to get better at that.)

Anyhoo, the presentations that we'll be making at the end of the summer were also discussed. First up is the presentation of our labs and our work to the U of R interns that will be visiting in a couple of weeks. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your view, I will be absent for that day. Next is a symposium-type presentation where many different students present their research to each other. That preso is the one that I'm considering the biking experiment for. Finally, the presentation to the other RIT interns. I've got a lot of time to work on that, though...no need to worry yet.

Following the meeting, we went to The King and I, a Thai restaurant. I'd been several times before, so I knew the food was amazing. History repeated itself, and the pineapple fried rice with chicken was as good as I remembered. It was also free. Which was even better. We also talked a lot about our (me and my fellow interns') college interests. This, coincidentally, was how I found out about RIT's possible ChemE program.

When we got back, we returned to coding. Eventually, we got that finished. I can't believe that 02:10:00 of video took us an entire day to code. And we still have three more tapes to look at. Ugh. Well, we're planning on bringing in speakers next week so we have some music to listen to while we work. After we finish boot camp, anyways...