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Day 6 – Return of the ReTI

Fear ye all who enter here, for…
IIIIIIIIII’mmm baaaaaaaaaaccckkk!
Hey all,

Today’s the first day back for the new week, and I hope everyone had a wonderful day.
For me, I’d call today a good day, if a little on the less exciting side. However, it did start out interesting with a fire truck in front of one of the entrances to RTI, as depicted below:

Never figured out why it was there, but I hope everyone was safe!

Otherwise, there were a ton of meetings, with a right off the back discussion with Dr. Thornburg, Emily, and I on questions with what he does at RTI and his average workday. After meeting Dr. Thornburg, Mrs. Michelle and I shipped out some sensors to one of the projects she started. Here’s a picture of the final packaging:


After that, we went to a safety meeting where I trailed behind lost as they argued over room numbers and the like. Apparently, they were making sure the old building design door numbers and the new blue print door numbers matched up. Interestin, to say the least. Later, Mrs. Allen stopped by for a quick check up and tour by Dr. Thornburg. 

After meeting Mrs. Allen, but before lunch, we learned how to use the software for the new micropems, which we are starting work on tomorrow. For lunch, I had a delicious cheeseburger and onion rings, and happened to meet Jonathan and Kiran who had transferred from to the forensics department of RTI for this week, an unexpected, but welcome, surprise.

After lunch, we retrieved data from some field tests until a meeting with Mr. Mecham, who gave some life tips and shared his background with us, much as with Dr. Thornburg this morning.

That pretty much concludes my day. I hope you all enjoy your day as well!

Sincerely,

Cameron L.

P.S. For those confused with the title’s joke, 1) it’s a reference to Star Wars, and 2) RTI stands for research triangle institute, so I just extended the first word for RTI to make ReTI… So yeah, hope you enjoyed the joke!

Day 7 – “The name’s PEM, Micro PEM.”

Hi all,

So today was a busy day!

We started micropem testing, then had a meeting with Mr. Marty, a chemical engineer at RTI, which lasted an hour and a half. We also visited his labs, but weren’t allowed a picture inside due to defense projects. Here’s one of us outside the door though!

After that was a lunch meeting with Mrs. Swung-Hyun, another worker at RTI in my building (number 11). Both mewing were extremely informative, although I’m partial to Mr. Marty’s myself since I want to be a chemical engineer.

After lunch, I suited up in my testing gear (featured below, excluding the static gun, my inspiration for today’s title) and started collecting data by walking around various areas in the vicinity while the pumps sucked in nearby air.

All in all, an exciting day. I hope you enjoyed my update!

Cameron L.

Spreading Positivity and Final Goodbyes

Well there you have it- just like that I’ve finished my last day of interning at centerline! I woke up this morning just a touch earlier than usual so that I could attend another one of the thursday morning agency talks. I’m not sure if I mentioned this before so I’ll fill you in anyway- this time is typically when the entire building has the chance to come together and watch an employee deliver a talk and share some of the cool stuff they’ve been working on. Today was also the day of my Snap chat takeover where I captured a bit of a day in the life of a student ambassador ( the snap feed is inserted above). However, because it was my final day, I wanted to do something where I can leave just a wee mark of who I am on Centerline one last time. Throughout my weeks at centerline I’ve seen some exceptionally talented individuals who work incredibly hard to put out the best content that they can. Whether it be Valentina and her leadership and communication skills, mike with his artistic abilities, brittany with marketing concepts or Tyler and his infectious creativity, every individual at Centerline has something amazing to contribute. Often in the mix of the fast paced agency environment it seems that maybe people don’t get the time to just sit back and recognize someone that they’re thankful for. So because of that I wanted to focus my Snapchat thread today on going around and asking people who they’re thankful for at centerline. Of course I wanted to make the feed interesting so that people would tune in, but I mainly wanted to just spread a bit of final positivity. Hopefully with that I was able do the best I could with this little opportunity of fun I was given. Throughout the day I also got to work with Courtney, a graphic designer, on making a phone background and some headers. Seeing as I find fonts and colors extremely therapeutic this was absolutely my cup of tea. As the day winded down I chatted with some of the employees that I’ve gotten to know one last time before I headed on back to High School life. It was bittersweet to leave as I’ve met so many wonderful people, had so many opportunities, and have had an experience that has been absolutely invaluable.

Sam and the other Centerliners, as I know you are probably reading this, Thank YOU! I appreciate you all and recognize just how hard you work, and that work goes towards making really amazing content. Thank you for the opportunity.. you have been so generous and friendly to let a 17 year old be a part of an agency for a couple of weeks.

Evie.

Day 8 – Classroom work in the outside world?!

Hello all!

Today was a busy day, as all good days are, sometimes. Anyways, it started out extremely interesting as I met the mysterious bad parker of building 11. Apparently, whoever they are, they always park on the line so that no car is to close to theirs. Usually it’s in the back, but today they were in the front row, so many, many more people saw them. Here’s what it looked like:


Incredibly rude, right? If you say no, I want you to move your car now. Literally, stop reading and move your car to the appropriate position. Done? Now let’s continue.

Today’s first task was aldehyde testing, and as we moved to Johnson building for the appropriate equipment, we ran across this little guy here:


… Or maybe not so little. The point is, the only reason I noticed was a startled scream that shocked me into stopping. That was fun, if slightly scary. Taking the long path due to Mrs. Michelle’s insistence, we finally arrived at our destination.

Now, we all know classroom work hardly seems like work in real life, right? Well, aldehyde sampling is a lot like classroom work, where we mix a bunch of chemicals and measure the results, but with this fancy machine:


Which is a HPLC system, or high pressure liquid chromatography system. This does a lot of minor measurements and records data that the naked eye wouldn’t normally see.

Anyways, after that we ate my final lunch at RTI before heading to meet Leag Johnson, a biochemist at RTI. After that meeting, I prepared sample filters for equilibration and post ODs/graphs.

Hope you enjoyed my day!

Cameron L.

P.S. Here’s some extras from today.

Hazardous waste dispenser 

Funny sign

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Video of vacumn to get rid Air/gas

Containers for the aldehyde

Day 7: From Mountaintop to Countertop

Grace again! Today was the last day of the work experience, and it sure was a productive one! We learned more about the mathematical details of CRS, learning that they outfit about 75 countertops every day, with two slabs of granite per counter, along with 56 slabs per “container”. We also tackled some more invoices and purchasing details, making sure the paid invoice amounts were in order. I had lots of fun and learned so much!

My delicious lunch from the new Italian eatery in Brier Creek, Positalia!

A CRS truck on its way to deliver some slabs!


Just some of the paperwork we filed 🙂
P.S. if you want to read up on how granite gets from mountaintop to countertop, take a look at this informative video CRS made! We learned all about it and it’s really informative and interesting:From Mountaintop to Countertop

Katie Day 8-Mobile Meal Plan

Today I toured the other half of the Interfaith Food Shuttle building: Meals on Wheels. Cary Academy has also partnered with this organization, which delivers hot, nutritious meals to seniors who cannot safely create meals for themselves. My mentor Ms. Karkare delivers food on a route every Friday, so she was happy to give me a tour of the building. The food is prepared every weekday in a big, industrial-sized kitchen not unlike Cary Academy’s. Then, volunteers pick up the meals to be delivered on a route. The whole operation takes over 2,000 volunteers to run every month! mow

Inside the Meals on Wheels kitchen

Katie Day 7-What’s Your Day Like?

Today I sat in on a mock consultation between Ms. Karkare and my mom. I experienced the work of an outpatient dietitian firsthand and got a glimpse into the process. First the dietitian asks the client about their lifestyle and diet on a normal day, and then will give advice accordingly. I learned surprising things from the consultation, like that it’s best to eat a salad with oil and vinegar so the body can more easily absorb the nutrients of the greens. I also learned that sleep is so important to the body, even when it comes to controlling cravings and allowing the body time to naturally detox itself. So next time someone tells you about the latest juice cleanse, let them know that all they need is a good night’s rest!

Office Space-Day 6- Wednesday

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Wednesday was a day spent mostly in the office. It allowed me to get some blogging done, as well as explore the ncleg website and do more bill summaries for the lobbyists. The website ncleg.com has everything on it to understand and track the state government. On the home page, you can listen to the Senate and House chambers and hear people speaking on all sorts of bills, they even have it archived so you can listen to arguments on recent bills that you are interested in. They have a calendar that shows every bill and amendment that is coming up in the next couple of days or has been done recently The bill pictured above was surprisingly controversial and important during the house session. It attempts to terminate the contract between the government and the people that built the toll roads and maintain them. This seems ok, tolls are annoying, but it would prevent any new roads from being built for a long time. With no specific revenue coming in for the construction of new roads, it would take almost thirty years under the current budget structure to set aside the amount of money necessary to build a new road. With such a sharp increase in population and thus road congestion in NC, we sort of need new roads.

Day 7- necks, necks and knee

Today I saw lots and lots of neck injuries. So, today I got to watch a lot of working on the notes in the neck in order to relive the pain. However, I did see one knee injury today. She had surgery on her knee and she already had full extension in her knee. Today the physical therapist was working on the bending of the knee. Instead of the regular extension exercises that the patient was normally doing she was instead doing exercises that worked on the flexibility in her knee when she would bend it. (Sorry there is no picture today because there was nothing I could get a picture of that didn’t have a patient in.)

Drew Day 5 Exploring the Site

imageIt was a half day so that everyone could leave and go to the beach for a long weekend but in the morning we went to the TOA site and went over how the site was going and the budget with the owner of the building and we also walked the site to see how it was progressing it was really cool and big. The biggest thing was going over sign placement and I pitched in an idea to make the sign three sided instead of only getting one or two directions and they went with my idea because they forgot it would be visible sense there was the electrical easement so you could see it from Briar Creek. Then we called it a day.