Month: May 2016

Day 1: What’s Up Doc?

Day 1 was an enriching experience with Dr. McElveen and his numerous patients. When Kiran and I arrived, we were nervous entering the enormous, winding office that the doctors worked in. We began with a staff meeting, where Dr. McElveen and his associates organized everyone’s schedule for the month. The staff worked well as a group, they were quite supportive and the staff meeting was a great way to observe everyone interact. During the meeting they celebrated the engagement of Kate, an associate, and commemorated John-Thomas Junior for the graduation of his children. Finally, the meeting was over and everyone split up into their own work spaces in the winding and confusing office.

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Next, Kate gave us a tour of the building and showed us where Kiran and I would set up our stuff for the week. We didn’t spend much time in there at all, though, we were often on our feet and participating in check-ups with patients. In fact, Kiran and I faced some adversity spending the entire day today on our feet, moving from room to room with Dr. McElveen and his patients and always standing in the corner, observing. It was fantastic listening to each patients story, every one of them had known Dr. McElveen personally, because he had worked with them for so many years.

We didn’t learn many logistical aspects of ear surgery or even the anatomy of the ear. We were taught that the ear consisted of three central bones, the malleus, the incus, and the stapes, but that was it for the most part. We watched Dr. McElveen remove a hearing aid from a patient under a microscope that was enhanced on a television screen in the corner, which was fascinating. Another patient was a young child who couldn’t work their hearing aid so that was interesting.

For the most part we focused on treating and handling patients today, and meeting the other doctors and learning about their individual specialties.

My Cold Calling Adventure

I hate talking on the phone.
Growing up in a world where my communication skills were honed by the written word–something that we have in common with the generation just before telephones–I’m often unsure of what to do or proper protocol in formal phone calls, especially with adults who don’t think twice about it. So having to read from a script I wrote myself was challenging for me and my social anxiety, though the task itself is obviously extraordinarily simple. But busy work like cold calling is integral to a multi-faceted organization like the NAACP, and it was at least informative to see how day to day operations like that work.


-Rosie

Day 3 there future

I started out in a conference call about one of there newer projects triangle orthopedics MRI pad and they had a broad overview like how is it coming sense the walls just went up yesterday then he sent me to drop off a package for the same project the contract he sent me to 2510 because that is the address he was given so I went there but there is no 2510 blue ridge so it was 3 buildings later that we found out it was actually 2501 and I finally delivered it and when I got back I went with them to there big office lunch at page road grill and they were going over the vacancy’s in there buildings. We then went to the site the meeting this morning was about and met with the person working the project with him at the site because they need to decide where they are putting the sign which is a lot harder than I thought. They still have not decided they need to talk to the guy that they are building for to help. When we got back to end we met with someone to upgrade there conference room with something that allows 8 people to project on there tv at once.

–Drewimage

Katie Day 3-Hall of Famers

Today I had lunch with Ms. Brown, Ms. Karkare and a few other friendly faces from the Interfaith Food Shuttle hub. Above, I am standing with the two women I am working with, and below Ms. Karkare is showing off her Cooking Matters gear. She was inducted into the “Cooking Matters Hall of Fame” for her great work volunteering with the program. This afternoon, I visited the Poe Health Education Center and spoke with the dietitian and dietetic interns that work there about the field and their jobs.

Day 3 @ Dunn PT

Today I got to see a lot more dry needling therapy today. There were a lot of patients that had sour muscles and the needles help to access the muscles and dry needles are the best way to release a lot of the tension in the muscles. A lot of the patients complain about how painful they were, but after the needles would come out the patients loved the results.

Another patient who was having neck pain needed to use a machine. The machine is a retracting machine. The purpose of the machine is to stretch out the vertebrae in the neck in order to release the pressure on the nerves which release pain to different parts of the body. The patient lays on the table and there neck goes in between the two sides

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(sorry this is not of the machine put together. I couldn’t get a picture of it put together because we can’t have pictures of the patients). The PT then adjusts the sides to fit to the patient’s neck. The machine then slightly lifts the neck to relieve the pressure off of the nerves which helps relieve the patient’s pain. 

Day 3 – From Print to Internet (N&O)

N&O - BuildingToday, I spent the morning at the News & Observer office in Downtown Raleigh. Despite initially having trouble finding the entrance to the building, I managed to arrive a few minutes early. Once there, I met Susan Spring the Director of Newsroom Operations.  I spoke to Susan for a little while before she gave me a tour of the Newsroom. She explained to me the basic layout of the floor and points of interest. They have a large screen on one of the walls that shows statistics from their website. She then showed me their research library, which houses a log of almost all the N&O papers over printed and other resources for the reporters to access for research. Then we met up with a group of 3 new hires and interns from McClatchy Co., their parent company. I walked around with them for a while as they were also taking a tour of the office. We also were able to sit in on the morning news meeting where all the reporters and other employees come together and plan out when their stories are going to be put up on the N&O website as well as whether they will contain video or not.

Once the meeting was over I met with one of their newer hires (she started Monday), Presley. She was hired specifically to work on a newer project of theirs called Collegetown. From what I gather, it is going to be used as a news outlet for the four major school in the Triangle: Duke, UNC, NC State, and Central. She was very determined to find new and interesting ways to get out the news out to people so that college students would be actively engaged in the content produced by the Collegetown site. She mentioned that they were planning on working with students who attend the college for articles since they would actually be there.

After speaking with Presley for a while I met two of the guys who handle photo and video editing. I had a lovely conversation with them about media and how people interact with videos. We talked about how videos are presented, what goes into them, as well as how&when people view them. We also spoke about video games a little bit, and how they have affected the media.

Lastly, I spoke with an investigative journalist, Daniel Kane, who was not a fan of his job title. He is a strong believer that all journalists no matter what they work on or where, they should all be investigating and asking “Why”. Daniel was the one who broke the story about the “Paper Class” scandal at UNC. He said it stared out as a different story but evolved when he found the discrepancies in the grade books. He thinks journalism is a good way to bring attention to things that are broken so that they might get changed.

Overall, visiting the N&O was a lot more exciting than I originally thought it was going to be. I found the varying opinions on the direction of the paper news to be very interesting, as well as the amount of both new and old technologies present at all the desks. I also got a t-shirt! AND A COOL PEN!

-CJ

Day 3: Gum Pudding

Today, Grace and I started our day off by sitting in on a weekly staff meeting with the rest of the GR&A (Global Reporting and Analysis) Team. Although serious matters were being discussed in the meeting, the mood was lighthearted and playful, and we even nicknamed the budgeting head, Joe, as “Captain B”! After the formal meeting was over, we talked about plans for a team member’s upcoming birthday celebration, as well as tomorrow’s food truck rodeo and 5k walk. In addition, we also listened to a song that was written about Courtney, one of the interns, by her cousin’s band (called Gum Pudding!) After the meeting, we learned the ins and outs of the software that the team uses to report and analyze their monthly data. Next, we went out to lunch with Courtney and Adanna, two college interns. They took us to Building F first, where we had breakfast for lunch, and then we all drove to Building R to get gelato! After lunch, we met with Brian to discuss accounting, and he showed us general templates for statements and explained how his job connected to Lisa’s team and the rest of the finance sector. Finally, we ended the day by learning about international taxes with Meg, Adam, and Mike, and they all explained how they got into international tax after explaining what they did on a regular day. Overall, it was a fun and relaxing day!

-Khushi

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Grace and I outside of Building R with our gelato- coffee flavor for me and mango for her!

IMG_3289My personal rendition of Joe the Budgeting Man, complete with a cape! (BTW: Joe totally approved of his superhero status.)

Micelle, Surfactants, and Nanoparticles – Oh my!

DLS example graph for Emily

Light Diffraction Data from a sample – for tips on what this means please browse the links below…

FAQ – ELS Overview         An_Introduction_to_DLS in 30 Minutes

There is never a shortage of things to do at RTI! Though the day started a little slow with some light reading (by the way the Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons by Sam Kean is a great read), once it started moving it never quite stopped. We continued some lab work from yesterday. First we ran samples (made from surfacant, chromium, and polymer) through a sonicator. A sonicator uses audio submerged in water to break up aggravated particles. Then we used a centrifuge to separate particles to the bottom. Next, came the fun part of syringing the solution into a curved cell to be put into a dynamic light scattering machine (or DLS). Surfacants are bipolar substances, which kinda look like tadpoles under a microscope, with a hydrophobic and hydrophilic end. Sometimes surfactants aggregate and form micelles, which are simply aggravated surfacant molecules in a colloid (a colloid is a mixture with insoluble substance microscopically dispersed). These micelles are spherical in shape with the hydrophobic tails facing towards the center. This brings us to the CMC (critical micelle concentration), which is the concentration of surfacants above which micelles form and all additional sufucants form micelles. THis is relevant information because when running the samples through the DLS the graphs will be erratic if the pH induced the formation of micelles and the size vary greatly. The purpose of an DLS machine is to track nano particles and the relative size of particles. One we reached lunch I got to sit in on the YP lunch presentations (that’s young professionals – man these people like their acronyms!). The presentations serve to bring people at RTI together to practice presenting their findings to a group in part to share their findings with other departments and to also give those with less established careers to have the experience of presenting. I heard a lecture on mapping the innovation process and the iterative cycles of learning and focus, fluorescent carbon nano particles found in coffee and fruit juices (presented by the one and only Phil Durham), and idea generation in relation to energy technology development. We then spent the remainder of the day continuing the study and learning about polymers. Yay!

 

Collecting Data (day 3)

Today I was able to help wire some of the sensors into the data logger that we will be using in the field. I then took some pictures (one of which is attached) of the wiring, and then compiled the pictures into an excel chart to show where the wires go. We will print out this spreadsheet so that we are able to bring it with us when we are setting up data collection outside of the lab. I was also able to familiarize myself a little more with programming as well as the setup of the equipment. Tomorrow we will setup some of the equipment to make sure we know what we are doing when we get to the site. — Iain

Day 3- 133 Acres of Camp

This morning, I cleaned off yoga mats the campers use for an activity called Music and Motion. It was explained to me that since kids on the Autism Spectrum often are very sensory oriented this activity allows them to combine the listening of music with dancing.


Then, Mrs. Allen came by to visit the camp and see what I was working on. Jada, the volunteer coordinator, helped explain what Camp Royall was like as well as how my work is preparing the camp to open in two weeks. After, I began labeling all of the mailboxes for counselors in the staff lounge. Since they hadn’t been used since last summer, I had to dust them off a lot as well. I also helped clean out the kitchen in the staff lounge for the remainder of the afternoon and some of the summer counselors arrived. So far, I have only been working with directors and assistant directors (a group of 15 or so), but there are about 50 staff in total that will be working here this summer.


The actual campsite is gorgeous and the large campsite allows for many animals such as two ducks that are residents year round. Overall, a fun and productive day!

-Fiona