In the interest of beating David's record of 5 posts, I present here the following: my sixth post. I think I left off the last one at last Sunday night, so I'll see what I can pick up from there. Monday was our orientation to everything. Needless to say, this was a very long day. We walked through the January sixty degree weather six blocks down third street to our orientation site at the early morning hour of 9:00. We heard the program director, John, talk a long time about things we should know. They had Chick-fil-A lunches, which, if I may be frank, have never been my favorite. I did try some cole slaw for the first time in my life though, and it was better than I expected (when you have an unpaid internship here, you soon learn to eat things offered to you free that you otherwise wouldn't). We went to Georgetown and got another long tour of places we would be going but would never be able to remember from this. We had our first class that afternoon, from 4:30-7:30. By the end of it, pretty much everyone was flat-out famished. The fact that we had a long walk to the subway station and 30 minute ride home did little to hearten us. Monday was pretty much just a long day in the worst way. We were told a lot of stuff we would not remember, were hungry and tired of walking all day, carrying folders and books and orientation-type things (t-shirts included). Also, everyone wore pants and coats, and were just really hot the whole time.
Tuesday was my first day of work. I rose at 7:30 for the first time in I have no idea how long and got all dressed up and headed to work in the forty degree weather. I arrived at AAAS very early, and actually just walked around the block to kill some time. I eventually went in, filled out some paperwork, and was led to my area. My office is on the eighth floor, in a back corner of a work room, literally behind some filing cabinets. As the intern coordinator Enita explained, my actual supervisor, Mark, was gone that day because of a prior commitment, so they couldn't really get me started on any projects. I was also not yet put into the system, so I couldn't even use my computer. I was given a few sheets to read about voting or something.
There was a big conference going on downstairs about intellectual property in science, and they eventually grabbed me and the other intern, Charlotte, to go assist with it. They put me outside the front door with the task of directing anyone who came out looking for relief to the restroom. I just kind of wandered around for a while then they told me to start working on writing a bio for the intern website. After working on this for around 30 minutes, the conference adjourned for lunch. After they all ate from the catered food, the rest of us helped ourselves. They had lasagna, it was pretty good. Then a bunch of workers from the dept. sat on a couch and talked for a while, then us interns were given the task of cleaning up the lunch, and putting the food in a kitchen for the office to eat (from my experience so far, there is always food available in the kitchen). Then we were allowed to go, at 2:00.
Work since then has picked up. Wednesday morning it was around 20 degrees in the morning, with a high during the day of mid thirties. Us interns usually have to find recent articles from scientific journals. We are also constructing a database of research articles on voting so I spend a lot of time entering data into that. Friday I went to a Senate committee hearing on stem cell research in the morning, chaired by Ted Kennedy. It seems like Congress is pretty strongly in favor of research, but it will be vetoed by Bush.
Well this is a pretty good time to end this, eh?