Day 2 (The Mentoring)

Today I woke up at about 6:15 and took a shower. It took a long time to get warm and my roommate Lauren, who took a shower before me, had taken a cold shower! We went to breakfast and it was your typical breakfast foods, cereal (of all kinds), bacon, eggs, French toast, biscuits and gravy, and last but not least hash browns. I saw my friend Alex G and Jeanmarie; they are with the other group staying at CNU. After Breakfast we had about 20 minutes until we had to leave so Nick Lauren and I went back to my room and had internet for about 10 minutes! J But then it sort of disappeared and didn’t come back.

We left for the NASA Center at 7:45 and went straight to the badge building. We had to wait in line for awhile and finally got our cool ID badges that let us go everywhere here. Once on site we went to an orientation room where we met our mentors. My mentor is Dennis Diones. He told me that the reason they chose me for this project was the science fair project I did my sophomore year, basically the effect of carbon dioxide on the ozone.

We had to hightail it out of the orientation building because this week I am part of a teacher’s workshop. I got to the workshop when everyone was introducing themselves. On the walk over Dennis told me that they want me to keep a journal and possibly do a podcast later on in the program! This week in the workshop I’m in charge of taking pictures and creating a journal so there will be lots of pictures from this week especially.

Next was the intro to the website which Dennis did himself and then Penny introduced the LAS (Live Access Server). LAS gives you live data from the specific area you are looking at and you can look at pictures around the world and the United States. It can give you data about the atmosphere, as in amount of aerosol in the air and air quality, clouds and cloud coverage and much more. The maps are very colorful, but I’m not sure if that is a good or a bad thing… I’m going to assume bad. From those pictures you can get lots of data and amounts of everything. Penny and Dennis showed us everything we will need to know and use for the next couple of weeks. I could not get Internet at the center so I couldn’t follow along on my computer for the introductions but I followed along up front anyways.

We had a break where everyone could work on the computer and test out the LAS. After that we had a talk about the Science of Clouds. We learned that every day 50 to 70 percent of the earth is covered by clouds. The lesson was really interesting and I learned a lot. Pim ran the talk and she was very good at it. It was very informative and I learned all about clouds and the atmosphere.

Next was lunch… It was okay we ate in the cafeteria and just kind of hung out there for a bit. I went back to our building early just to go on my computer and just kind of hang out before I had to get to work again. But, at lunch I told Cheryl (the G school director) what I was doing this week and she was pretty upset and she said that she will find another place for me to go. That makes me feel a lot better because I would rather do anything else than make a photo journal for this workshop.

This was a total waste of a day. I sat on my computer and did nothing after lunch and basically just listened to my music and photoshopped a picture. But we went to the wind tunnel soon after.

The wind tunnel was really cool and we got to see them test it with a fake race car! But i felt really bad because i was 20 minutes late getting back for cheryl to pick me up. :( the rest of the day was pretty un eventful... we played soccer right when we got back and then we went to dinner. After dinner we played tennis and then i went in and took a quick shower. Then the internet wasnt workign so Cheryl was freaking out. We decided to go on a Ben and Jerry's run for a destressitizer :) We headed back to the dorm and hung out in each other rooms and in the hallway for the rest of the night.

I talked to people back home and i miss you all!