First Blog

Hey y’all.

Für meine erste Blog, werde ich auf Deutsch schreiben. Ich glaube, dass...

just kidding

I’ve been in D.C. for just under a week now and I’m having a great time. Twice, I had to walk a mile in the snow to the metro station, and it was 25 degrees and somehow sunny this whole week but I’ll get used to it. I even ate Ghanaian food on Tuesday. That was new.

But, this is supposed to be a senior project blog, not a vacation blog. As most of you know, my original senior project was to take place at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. I had written up a proposal and a research question and had a whole ton of citations and sources. I was all set and only had to do a bit of research when...

It fell through. In mid-January, we were informed that the institute could no longer take me on, and that all of that work was for naught. BUT, though Mr. Nishan’s wonderful contacts at the American Physiological Society in Bethesda, Maryland, I was able to get another internship lined up, just like that. I still get to go to Washington for two months and everything’s great, but...

I don’t have a research question, and it’s a bit late to formulate one. Fortunately, my supervisor at the APS is their director of education, Dr. Marsha Matyas. I had a phone conference with her a few weeks ago, and she assured me that they would do everything they could to help me find something to research. They have a lot of fingers in a lot of pots in science research, education, and policy, three areas which interest me greatly. So, I was to work there for a while and then come up with something.

Well, I’ve just had my first week working there (Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday from (9:15 AM to 4:15 PM), and I’m getting closer to a testable hypothesis. I am to meet with Dr. Matyas on Tuesday to discuss and possibly zero in on one of my many options.

What are those options? I’ll blog about those tomorrow.