Author: Nathan Kassai, Email: kassan2@unlv.nevada.edu
Date Last Modified: 08/12/2024

This is our final week of our internship! It's unbelievable that two and a half months have passed us by so quickly, but Francis and I had learned so much. We also got the chance to work on such an awesome project, and work with an even better team of capable engineers with many years under their belt. It felt cool to say that I worked with a government position (kinda cool to say that the work I did was secret, but also kinda frustrating, lol).

Unfortunately, I did not get to meet anybody new in my last week. I did get a chance to say goodbye to many members of RSL, as well as receive compliments on the work that I and Francis had achieved over our few months.

In addition to the cool projects that I had worked on, and my amazing mentors, I realized that I have started to slowly build my own network. My mentors have all insisted that if needed, they will absolutely write letters of recommendation, and just overall vouch for me, whether for grad school or a different job. Since joining DASL, I really didn't have a network of people at all. Over the past three years, I haven't just been building my technical skills in robotics, I have begun to create a network of many people who I can rely on for advice, to help me on a certain task/project, or to receive letters of recommendations from. I see successful people like Dr. Oh, Dongbin, Jean, Nick, Baekseok, Zahir, etc. who have been networking for a long time; to see that I am beginning to do the same, comforts me knowing that I am going down the right path as my admirable peers and advisors.

In this final week, my job was to make sure that I tie up any loose ends with my code, make it abundantly clear its functionality, and to push my latest commit to our repo. Sad, but necessary ending.