Today was by far the most interesting day of the week! After a short morning meeting, Mr. Callens showed me around campus to the Color Science Building, so I could help out a graduate student with her experiment. Yesterday late night, Matt sent me the updated and corrected data set, which I ran through successfully. The Light Curves now look like what is expected of them. Today I spent a large amount of time making the program smoother, adding the arguably most difficult component: break lines in the graph. As the dates are divided into two main groups, SAGE and SAGE-VAR with a difference of 1500 days, the plot has a ton of empty space. By adding 60 lines of code, I was able to split the plot into two subplots, a task that took up 3 hours. The next few hours were spent on rearranging the title and the axis labels, as well as further debugging.
For lunch, we listened to a talk by a research professor in the CIS building. He talked about the life of a scientist (the many pros and cons), as well as his experience as a wildfire researcher. His talk greatly influenced my future plans; he said while the path to become a scientist is very tough, the rewards are so much greater. After the talk, I went over to the Color Science Building to help out Nargess with her experiment. I had to identify faint blue dots on differently colored backgrounds. When I came back to the LAMA (Laboratory for Multiwavelength Astrophysics), I continued in debugging my newly written code. While the project isn't completely finished, I am already happy with the progress I've made. Not only did I learn a completely new language (Python), I was able to apply it to a real life project; an incredible feeling.
For lunch, we listened to a talk by a research professor in the CIS building. He talked about the life of a scientist (the many pros and cons), as well as his experience as a wildfire researcher. His talk greatly influenced my future plans; he said while the path to become a scientist is very tough, the rewards are so much greater. After the talk, I went over to the Color Science Building to help out Nargess with her experiment. I had to identify faint blue dots on differently colored backgrounds. When I came back to the LAMA (Laboratory for Multiwavelength Astrophysics), I continued in debugging my newly written code. While the project isn't completely finished, I am already happy with the progress I've made. Not only did I learn a completely new language (Python), I was able to apply it to a real life project; an incredible feeling.