Author: Ethan Nowery, Email: nowery@unlv.nevada.edu
Date Last Modified: 08/26/2024

This was my last week at NIST. Overall, this experience has been an incredible one. Even though most of the week was taken up by interns giving their presentations, there was still work that needed to be done back at the lab. We wanted to test more extreme terrains in order to increase the difficulty. Pictured is a 20-degree incline with pallets laid out around a visual task. Each end of the pallets has pipes attached to them that rotate to create a slip factor.

This week I met several new people. Tues-Thurs was spent with having all interns give a presentation for their projects that were done over the course of the summer. I went to several of these talks and a couple of them I met afterwards.

Because this was my last week and majority of my time was utilized at the presentations of the other interns, I really got to see the inclusive community at NIST. Many different mentors, employees, directors, and other interns were watching and supporting each other for our presentations. I, myself, gave my presentation to a room of 20+ people, majority of them I did not know nor had I seen before.

I did a lot of reflecting this week about what I want to accomplish going forward. I did a lot of construction and woodworking this summer and now I can say that im confident in my abilities with that. I really want to shift my focus to projects and things that im not comfortable with and need to learn, such as more technical projects that include coding, ROS, ubuntu, etc. I can say that my drive and motivation for learning has come back and I can't wait to dive right in.

The projects I worked on this summer are forever changing and I cant wait to see what the next iteration is. Its been amazing to work on these different projects and to work in 'the real world' for a summer.