Hi, it’s been a while since I did any activity on this blog. I guess its time to keep the “readers” updated on what’s going on.
Quite a lot has happened in the time since my last blog post. This should be unsurprising. The most interesting things that have happened have occurred over weekends. However, my time at work has allowed me to realize several things. First, I want my future career to involve research and alternative energy. This means that my education plans need to become clearer. Before this summer, I thought I might get a masters degree; however, I now believe that I should get a PhD (although I haven’t decided what I’ll focus on). I’m thinking about these several options: Materials Science and Engineering (what I’m doing for a bachelors), Mechanical Engineering, Nuclear Engineering (a strong possibility), Condensed Matter Physics, or Plasma Physics (in order to work with nuclear fusion). I hadn’t thought of plasma physics until I had a conversation with someone at the NRL (Naval Research Laboratory) and he suggested I look into the field. In a way, it’s relieving to have a better plan about my future than I had before. At the same time, it’s because I’m pretty sure I know what I’ll be doing, I have a better idea of the difficulties I’ll have in the future.
Generally, my weekends have consisted of one day of staying around the house (s0 I can go grocery shopping) and then the other day I go into DC. Over the past few weeks, I’ve gone into DC and explored the museums more. I’ll tell you about my most interesting/stressful weekends of the summer.
It all started on a Friday….
Several friends, my roommate, and I go out for dinner on Fridays. We decide to eat at a different ethnic restaurant. That weekend, it was a Korean place. Other than the food and conversation, nothing very interesting happened while eating. Afterword, we split up and I decided went to get ice cream with 2 friends and my roommate went back to the house to visit his family. At the restaurant, they wouldn’t split up the bill. So we had this system where someone paid for my meal and I agreed to pay for their ice cream. However, when it came to pay for the ice cream, my debit card was declined because it was expired. This ended up not being a problem because the other person with us was able to cover the ice cream. It wasn’t the end of the situation. I didn’t change my banking address when I moved out to Centreville because I didn’t see any reason to. This meant that my bank sent a debit card to my home address, and no one at home notice. And I obviously didn’t think about my debit card expiring, or this wouldn’t have happened. Over the week, I called my bank and was basically told that I was completely screwed because there were no physical banks to visit and they wouldn’t mail a debit card to an unverified address. The next weekend I was left with about $20 in cash and $4 on my metro (smartrip) card. I spent the weekend with my friends hanging around DC, and basically survived on their willingness to cover me for any of the expenses that came up (lunch, dinner, and ice cream). That was a bit of a stressful weekend because if I got lost or separated from them, I was out of luck; however, I had a lot of fun going around and doing things in DC. So, I’d say that the stress was completely outweighed by that. For the upcoming week, I didn’t have any money to pay for groceries. Which meant that I just used whatever food I had left in the house, and basically subsisted on bulk food items that I purchased at Costco. At the end of the week , I received a package of my debit card that my parents were able to mail me. The lessons that I learned from this experience was that I need to keep track of when my debit card expires and have more than one way to pay for things (ex. a credit card).
so back to talking about other weekends. I’d like to be able to actually explore the city by wandering around, but there are so many museums that I get caught up visiting them. I particularly like all of the Smithsonian’s that I’ve been to. I’m harboring the hope that I’ll be able to come back to DC to live or work, next summer or the future. I really love this city.
This weekend, at the time of writing this, I haven’t done much. I went to a used bookstore with my aunt and then spent time with her and my family in the area. We watched a few movies, namely, Galaxy Quest and Star Trek (the first rebooted one). Today though, I’ll be going into Baltimore. I’m going with a friend who is picking their roommate up from the airport. What we are planning on doing is to visit things in Baltimore and then pick up their roommate. I’m not sure what we’ll do because there are a lot of options, but I’m looking forward to it because I haven’t been able to do anything in Baltimore this summer.