08 June 2009

The Nation's Capital



So today I begin a new chapter. I finished my last day of college, ever, last Friday and promptly boarded a plan for DC on Sunday. I am living in the dorms on George Washington campus, which are....dorms. I haven't lived in dorms for so long, but all my roommates are awesome, so it will still be alot of fun. We have 2 doubles off a central living room with a kitchen and our own washer/dryer, so I guess I can't complain. I live with a girl named Caitlin from the the University of Miami that is also interested in energy stuff. I love all the interns, everyone is so interesting and smart. There is a guy from U of MN too. I will do formal introduction in another blog, otherwise this one will get too long. But they are all great. Today, Monday, was our first day. I woke up and went for a run in the morning, which was awesome. Washington has alot of great bike trails and a ran along the river for a lot of it. Tomorrow I'm going to go running on the mall and do sprints on the Lincoln Memorial Steps. How cool is that. At 10:30 we met at the IEEE office, which is about a mile walk from our dorms. We got a brief orientation and got to meet our sponsors. Mine is this cool guy named Dave Richmond. He worked for the Atomic Energy Commission and the DOE and is very smart and funny, and not too serious either. He is older and retired and really wants to help me, which is awesome. He is already setting up more meetings for me with people from the American Nuclear Society and energy people from AIChE that he knows. After lunch we walked down to our offices. There are 2 other AIChE interns, Jenn from Texas and Steven from Cornell, and we have offices in the American Chemical Society Building. Our building is about 4 blocks from the white house and right in the thick of things on Capital Hill. It is also an amazing resource. There are people working on energy there and also an extensive library and librarians to help us. Everyone we have meet so far has been so nice and welcoming and ready to give us whatever resources we need to work on our papers. The amount of material available is actually overwhelming, I feel like I'll never have time to read it all! We had an early day today, left work at about 4, and heading home to go to Target and pick up some essentials that we had all neglected to bring. We had dinner at a cute little bar by our dorms called "Quincey Pharmacy". I'm getting some stuff together for graduation this weekend and then will go to sleep to get ready for a busy day tomorrow. I'll tell you all about it after. All in all, I am so excited for this summer, it is going to be great!

1 comment:

cheryl said...

I am so happy you are blogging. It is great to read about what DC is like. Keep it up!