…but I wouldn’t know it because I spend all of my time locked away in a cave, slaving away over awkward graphical LabVIEW code. I kinda love it. The magical Santa Barbara weather is still there after work and on the weekends because the weather in Santa Barbara is magical at all times. I’d like to drive up the mountain to bring donuts to the wizard that keeps it so beautiful here but he doesn’t take visitors.
That’s a picture of the user interface for the program I’ve been working on for the past three weeks. It controls a fancy camera that measures the light spectrum of whatever you shine on it. We’re going to use it to measure the sidebands produced by a tiny piece of semiconductor when we blast it with terahertz frequency light. I’m told that some day in the distant future, this could make your internet go much faster. When you’re streaming kitten videos in 7680×4320, you can think of me.
LabVIEW is an interesting language. I’m not sure you’d even call it a language. It’s actually pretty similar to written programming languages logically but it’s a much bigger pain to make things happen. On the other hand, it’s significantly easier to read once it’s finished. I didn’t know anything about LabVIEW before I got here so it was a bit of a challenge to produce a functional interface for our equipment. This morning I basically finished it. I’m sure there will be a bunch of bugs to fix and there are still a few interface features that I’d like to add but it does everything that it needs to do. I am ecstatic. It feels really amazing to go from guy-who-knows-nothing-about-anything to guy-who-made-something-that-we-use-to-make-science.
Look at all of those flat sequence structures and cringe like you know what I’m talking about.
The rest of my INSET experience has been just as great. Everyone that I encounter, from my roommates to my research group, is wonderful to interact with. I really enjoy working with my mentor too. He gives me a lot of freedom but he’s always willing to help any time I have questions. I was very anxious coming into this program and feeling clueless. INSET is built to mitigate that cluelessness. We have great seminars that teach us all about research. We also have weekly practice presentations so that we’re pros by the end of the program when we have to present our research projects to a real audience. Even though we still get tossed into this crazy new world, we have someone holding our hands and showing us the ropes from time to time. The lab is a blast too. There’s always something to do and everything you do is important, even if it’s in some tiny way. The sense of accomplishment is thrilling. I can’t imagine a better way to spend my summer.