I finally finished my internship project today, it was really nice being able to see my project run without errors. I also completed my presentation for the end of my internship here at SPAWAR. So basically I have a POL for my internship as well. I have to return to SPAWAR on Thursday to do that. The internship coordinator here emailed us about the presentation and included in the email the fact that we would get to make ice cream with Liquid Nitrogen. It should be pretty fun and maybe it will make the presentations a little bit easier.
The office has been really empty recently, and then of course Dwain and Adrian show up out of nowhere and it does not feel as solemn and quiet. I found out today that a friend of mine who works at SPAWAR is actually the division head of my mentor's group. So that makes him my mentor's boss's boss. My mentor was really surprised when he found out I knew him. I have been talking with him recently to see if I could return to SPAWAR in the future for another internship. I really hope it does work out because this is a pretty cool place to work.
Today, when I showed up at the office, it was pretty empty, ok really empty. No one was here except for my mentor, but he soon informed me that he would be leaving to go do something. I thought I would be stuck alone but thankfully Dwain was here so I worked with him and learned what he was working on today. It is surprising because he is normally not in our office but he has been here quite a lot, and of course I still struggled with the ever challenging project.
Today I helped Patrick move some things that appeared in our main entryway. We did not know where it cam e from but we knew that it had to be moved. After we finished, we found out that it was Adrian's stuff. He apparently dropped it off in a rush early this morning. Later in the afternoon, he helped me understand why my C++ code was having some issues. It was difficult to talk to customer support since I am not yet fluent in C++, hopefully soon I will be.
Boy, my project is a lot harder than I originally thought. In the beginning it felt like I could pick this up along the way but it has proven to be pretty difficult. I have been learning along the way but the solutions always seem to be just beyond my reach. Dwain showed me some more of what he did today and I helped him finish some of his work.
Today Dwain showed me what he does and how he does it. He normally builds and designs radio towers and installs them in different places around the world. Today he was running some simulations to see how much coverage a group of radio towers had on an area. He does about once a year he says and he does it for different people who request it to be done.
Today I met Adrian, he is a Computer Engineer at SPAWAR. He showed me really how C++ works. I was extremely confused be he helped me out and explained exactly what was happening. Also, my teacher paid a visit today to see what I have been doing. It was a lot shorter than I had expected.
I could not come into my internship for the past week because my mentor was on travel. He says that he has not gone on travel in a long time and he is really surprised that it happened right now. He has to go out and teach some people how to use some equipment. Today he told me a bit about what he did. I do not know if I have the permission to say what he did but it did sound pretty interesting.
I really want to go give the creators of Google a big thank you. Google has taught me many things and has helped me problem solve a lot of my issues with C++. I also am really grateful for the creators and moderators of stackoverflow.com and learncpp.com. Those were both great websites that helped me achieve my goals when coding. It brings a lot of satisfaction when my code 'succeeds'.
Today I finally started to learn C++. Well technically I did start yesterday but did not get much success, or any at all actually, but today I finally got the "Hello World" code to work. I also worked on two other challenges my mentor gave me. One was to make a code that would show the Fibonacci Sequence to how ever many places it was inputted as. The other one I did was to take five random integers, that the user inputs, and place them in order from least to greatest. This morning I needed to show up early for a meeting my mentor had but he found out that it was actually on Thursday.
Today I tried to learn the coding language C++. It is really difficult, I could not even finish the "Hello World" part. This is pretty complex in comparison to Python but my mentor says it is simpler and better.
Today, four other High Tech High interns and I went through orientation at SPAWAR. We met a few of the different heads of security and safety as well as a few of the people around the compound. We spent quite some time with John Brandes, the "Silly Scientist" as e refers himself as because he has his major in computer science but is still referred to as a scientist. He welcomed us and popped quite a few jokes while we were with him. He is from New York and is really excited to be working with interns this year. I also met with my mentor, Sunil Ramlall and he showed me a few of the projects he has been working on over the years. He went to UC Irvine and UC Berkeley where he graduated and became an electrical engineer. The other interns will be starting a week from now and finishing a week later. We also have to come back and give a presentation on our research r work over the four weeks.
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