10 days away from both my last exam and 21st birthday, it’s incredibly cliché but also accurate to say that boy time flies. It’s surreal how quickly junior year flew by and has me already anxious for how quickly senior year is going to go. While this last semester went quickly, it also included a ton of awesome highlights including:
Presenting Smart Grid Research at EE Research Symposium
Engineers Without Borders Project Trip in Honduras
PAC-12 Rugby Sevens Tournament
Random beach trips with friends
National Academy of Engineering Global Grand Challenges Summit in London!
iPodia!!
Coachella Weekend One
Rugby Banquet
With the past year being just that – the past – it’s time to look forward at my summer plans.
Cue up your Common, Kanye West, Smashing Pumpkins, Miles Davis, Chance the Rapper or Herbie Hancock song, because we’re heading back to the City of Wind, Chicago. Well, just outside of Chicago anyways. This summer I have the pleasure and great opportunity to intern at Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, Illinois, just 30 minutes outside of Chicago.
ANL
I’m going to be working in the Nuclear Engineering division, where my project will be developing and optimizing a virtual simulator for a nuclear reactor. The motivation behind this project is that a better training and simulation tool needs to be made available for nuclear reactors. A virtual simulator could serve several different purposes including faster, more comprehensive training of nuclear reactor operators as well as demonstrating the safety of the reactors more in depth to representatives from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. All in all, the project is incredibly appealing to me because it will encompass several different aspects of engineering that I have learned here at USC including but not limited to: 1) mechanical systems modeling via AutoCAD packages (yayyy AME-308!) 2) robotics programming 3) C++ and Python programming (EE-355 hollaaa) 4) fluids simulation (see Mech-op, Fluid Mechanics, Heat Transfer). I’m excited to not only work on my own project, but also to explore some of the other fascinating projects going on at Argonne and pick the brains of some of the smartest students and researchers in the country. While this will be my last blog of the semester, make sure to follow me on Twitter for interesting (hopefully) adventures and musings as I make the most of my Summer 2013.
That’s all for now. And as always, fight on!
