AUGUST 2023

Wow, I am burned out. It's a weird kind of burnout....I'm used to the type I get from college where my brain completely turns off after about eight weeks of cramming upper division physics classes into my brain to vomit it out for exams and quizzes with very little time for doing normal human things. This one is a little different, because my job is only 40 hours a week (much less than I work on schoolwork), but there's so many different responsibilities flying around right now that I'm getting extremely worn out from trying to manage all of them at once. It doesn't help that my brain really does not enjoy working or focusing on much at all during the summer :P

In good news, I feel like I did actually manage to be a lot more productive this week. I started Monday off by realizing I had calculated everything entirely wrong and sobbing a desk for about an hour, but after I got over it I was able to redo everything and make a good plan for the rest of the work to be done. I think I'm just about finished now! It's still kind of annoying that I'm not really supposed to talk about what I did yet - I still have that possibly naive outlook that science always deserves to be shared. Not that my science is all that revolutonary or groundbreaking, but! It's still science lol. Either way, I'm glad I got some good work done. All that's really left to do is work on the presentation I have to give on Tuesday, and start writing a big report to give to the internship program to prove I didn't actually just sit on my ass for the entire summer.

Despite my work burnout, I'm starting to get a little more prepared for school in September. I still have about four weeks until the quarter starts and I intend to make the most of being back home with my friends, but I somehow do kind of miss that whirlwhind cycle of hammering math and physics into my brain. I say this until I'm actually tasked with solving a differential equation for the first time in three months. I'm sure there will be plenty of groaning and griping then. For now I'm just going to try to take things as they come and handle what needs to be handled. The most chaotic thing right now is just trying to get my reactor operating requirements in order before I have to take the exam. The supervisor back at uni isn't answering any of my time sensitive emails. Which is awesome. Hope he hasn't exploded or anything.

Only two weeks left of this internship...have to say I am done with this and ready to go home. There's a lot of encouragement from every side, including the lab itself, to return for a full time job but I really don't think this is the place for me. I have few rules for myself, but one of them is to not let my interest in nuclear turn me evil. And it's really hard to not break that rule when working for a national lab with a focus on defense. And yet! I still feel bad that I think my work on it has been pretty shitty. Despite going into my last year for a physics degree, I'm still pretty stupid and clumsy around the lab and am kind of struggling to get my experiments finished (and finished well).

I feel like it's not entirely my fault since I don't have a lot of time to do the experimentation myself after weeks of waiting for clearances and breaking through red tape but even so I'd like to do a better job. At the very least so I can trust I can use my boss here as a reference and she won't start complaining about how I wasted 10 weeks of everyone's time. It's Sunday today, and I'm going in early tomorrow to finish up a final presentation I'll have to give on whatever results I end up with. My time is also reduced because my advisor from school is actually coming to the lab for some summer school thing, and wants me to join. I already accidently pissed her off earlier this Summer when I left her out of my attempts to figure out the thesis project and I can't make her even more mad, so I'm pretty obligated to do it. I really dislike how much I have to answer to other people right now. I know I will always have some boss or another, but I have TERRIBLE authority issues and an individuality complex and kind of hate how much work I have to do to placate everyone else and fit in and play the game correctly around everyone.

In good news, I'm getting some more progress done on some of the other things I need to prepare for! I have a medical test ready and am planning a fingerprinting date for the reactor exam (which I'm still procrastinating studying for), and am still really glad we have a set time for the exam after like three years of operating without being an official Federal Operator and all that. I've also been making more progress in harrassing a bunch of professors across the country regarding PhDs, and I've gotten a few good responses! I have a meeting with one from [REDACTED], am attempting to schedule one with someone from [REDACTED] (thanks to a connection from a tumblr mutual) and somehow have managed to get on the good side of a prof from [REDACTED]. Hoping against all hope that one works out - [CENSORED] is my dream school for nuclear engineering but....its. [EXPUNGED]. So I'm really trying not to get my hopes too high about that./p>

My first post/update comes during a very hectic time of my life! As of writing this, I'm currently working full time at a national lab for the Summer, trying to pull together a project for an undergrad thesis, beginning applications for a PhD, figuring out the best classes to take for this year, studying for an official reactor operator exam, and also attempting to figure out how to actually put to use the scholarship I managed to land a few months ago. I feel very lucky to have so many opportunities and things to work on, but it's definitely left me a little overwhelmed to have to deal with everything all at once.

On a daily level, my life is at least pretty interesting right now! I have to get up way too early to every morning to bike down to the lab (shoutout to adults who still can't drive), and then I have about 9 hours every day to spend attempting to be productive and not make any of my bosses mad at me. I can't talk a lot about the large scale project as of now, but my personal work is pretty much [REDACTED]! It took a very long time for me to get clearance into the lab (about the size of a large closet) and in the meantime I had to do quite a lot of predictive modeling, which required me to actually have to use Python for once in my life. I've had more fun with some of the cool Controlled Government Software used for the modeling - I'll miss it when I have to go back to university research since it would be really useful for my other job too :(

Working at a national lab is a bit different than I expected it to be....its Government so everything takes FOREVER to start/process/get permission for, and I can't help but feel like there's a lot of time wasted, especially compared to my other job where we constantly try to get things done as fast as possible under the time sensitive glare of industry capitalism deadlines. People also seem....a bit more normal? professional? than in industry? At my old place everyone was pretty strange and I felt comfortable dressing and acting as usual (as long as it was lab safe!) and could often be found operating the reactor in skeleton gloves or running around covered in several layers of red eyeshadow and glitter. As god intended.

Here, there's not an official dress code but people still seem to insist on going to work in fancy button up shirts and slacks and dress shoes 0_0. Anyone who wears dress shoes when it's not required has something clinically wrong with them. I don't really have many professional clothes yet, so even though I try not to look too crazy and wear my one pair of dress pants way too often, I still kind of stick out in my docs and sparkly jackets and dyed hair. These things would seem pretty normal anywhere else but I seem to have become stuck in some strange corporate dimension. If anyone knows the portal out of here please let me know.

I only have a few more weeks at this position, and then I can go back to my hometown and enjoy the rest of my summer with my friends and family! I'll still have to follow through with the rest of my obligations, but I'm looking forward to being able to wake up a little later than 6am for once. It was only a year ago, but this break is a lot different than the Summer of 2021, where I had exactly zero things to do and spent most of my time hanging out at the public library with one of my friends or badly attempting to program the floorbot from FNAF so my brain didn't start rotting into mush. I'm kind of glad to have things to do this time, just because I get really antsy really quick if there's no deadlines breathing down my neck. Although I'm a little busier than I would like to be, I'll still appreciate how exciting it is to start ramping up to Doing Science this year!