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Catherine Phillips - Eighth Week

My last week was actually one of my most fun. I had pretty much finished with my research and was working on a presentation that I had to do for the Provost Program. This gave me a lot more free time, and I spent it hanging out with friends and generally enjoying my last days in Newark. I went out to lunch with Jaqueline, one of my friends who was also working at NJIT, pretty much every day, and our cuisine ranged from the food truck right outside the building to a place that served exclusively meatballs.
I actually became really fond of Newark in my stay there. It’s definitely not as bad as people make it out to be, and there are a lot of parts about it that are good, or just funny. Since I went on daily walks for pretty much my entire stay, I knew the layout of the city very well, and had explored a lot (but only in the not-sketchy areas). I, of course, had my favorite walking path, which had many of the nicest views in the city. I also really liked some of the quirkier things about Newark, like how I’m pretty sure Prudential owns literally half of it, or the bridge that definitely did not look fit to carry anything but was still being used for all the trains to New York. This was a big change from when I lived in North Carolina, when I was pretty scared and uncomfortable in cities. I’m not sure if it was general acclimation or me learning how cities worked that made it easier, but I now really enjoy urban environments.


The presentation that I made for the Provost program was pretty nice, it summarized all my research (so like these but a powerpoint). My final results were pretty much that the post-flare loops behaved as expected. Sadly, I didn’t really see anything out of the ordinary, although that was partially because I was untrained as to what exactly ordinary was. I presented it on the last Friday, along with all the other students in the program. My PI actually came to see my presentation, which was really nice. Before that, I had visited the undergrad students doing the same thing, so I knew pretty much what to expect. While at the undergrad symposium, my friends actually left me because I was talking to someone about the robot they made for too long. Sadly, I didn’t get anyone that extremely interested in my research when I presented, although there was a physics student that had a lot of interesting questions for me.

Overall, I really enjoyed doing my research! Learning a new computer language was fun, and applying it to solar physics was really interesting. I really appreciated having a project of my own where I could have a lot of control over the methods, and I think it helped me learn a lot more than just being told what to do. I also really enjoyed my stay in Newark, both the living alone aspect and the general environment. Basically, I had a great time! I really enjoyed working with everyone in the lab, and I’m super grateful for the opportunity.
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