I have learned a lot within the last three weeks, and I expect to learn even more as this internship progresses. This summer is my first taste of research experience in a research lab, so I had no idea what to expect. Although I did a bit of reading about my project before the internship started, I spent a lot of my first week becoming familiar with not only my project, but also adjusting to the new environment and lifestyle. Living in a new city has been an awesome experience, and staying with other INSET interns made living away from home a lot of fun. Whether it is spending some time with my roommates in our apartment, or exploring downtown Santa Barbara, this summer has been filled with lots of new experiences.
The environment in my lab is generally pretty quiet. To be honest, I was expecting the lab to be fairly quiet, considering how each researcher has their own research that they are working on. However, my mentor, Mohammad Mirzadeh, always sets aside some of his time to help me whenever I have any problems. He does an excellent job answering my questions as well as explaining to me the various parts of my project. My project involves learning the basics of parallel programming with message passing interface, and various algorithms such as semi-Lagrangian in order to help parallelize some existing software libraries that my mentor is using. This parallelized software should help reduce the time it takes for my mentor to solve partial differential equations.
My project has been quite a roller coaster like experience, for there are lots of ups and downs. Most of my highs involved finally getting a piece of code to compile and run, while a lot of my lows are dealing with debugging. Getting the code to successfully compile is only a quarter of the battle, as most of my time was spent hunting around for pesky bugs in my code. While I spent countless hours trying to fix my MATLAB code, there were a few times where I forced myself to take a break from coding in order to get some fresh air. Thankfully, Goleta Beach is conveniently located a few minutes away from my lab, and taking in the fresh ocean breeze helped me get my mind off of my work. While I hope I do not resort to bashing my head against my keyboard out of frustration in the coming weeks, I am glad that I am making slow but steady progress with my work.
On a side note, I really enjoyed the ground-breaking research/innovative technology (GRIT) talks that are taking place this summer. I have gone to a few, and the talks are very informative and quite eye opening. One talk in particular, Theodore Kim‘s that was given Monday, July 15th, was most interesting because he devised algorithms that were used to solve partial differential equations. These solutions were then used to simulate different physical phenomena such as smoke or fire. Then it hit me, this is exactly what researchers in my lab are doing! When Dr. Kim was talking about simulating fluids with Navier-Stokes equations I was thinking, “Hey, I remember reading up on that!” It was an awesome feeling being able to understand the more technical parts of a talk, and it was all thanks to the research work that I have been doing!
