My New "Job"

Yes, I know that I don't really have a job because I don't get paid. But I can pretend, can't I?

I've mastered the art of taking the T (it's actually quite simple, but I must thank Sachi for her advice nonetheless). I now take it to work every morning, and to return home every evening, so I feel like a commuting businessman. Yesterday, I attended a lab safety training lecture, along with the thirty-eight other research interns. Then, a graduate student came from each lab, we had lunch, and then they took us to the labs. Most of the people were going to work at BU labs; there was only one other person, a girl named Melissa from Long Island, who was going to work at MIT with me. The graduate student took us in his hybrid car to the MIT Francis Bitter Magnet Laboratory, where we were going to work. He then showed us around the labs; there were cryostats with liquid helium that can go down to 0.4 degrees Kelvin (this is impressive, if you didn't realize), strong magnets, electron beam writer, etc. Then he took us to a library and gave us articles to read about what we will be working on. Our research has to do with magnetic spin, quantum tunneling, giant magnetoresistance (GMR), and may lead to the development of better computer memory, where if your computer crashes no unsaved data is lost. Are you impressed? Well, I haven't done anything yet. The professor is absent until late on Wednesday, and we are waiting for him before we start our project. Today, I took the Green Line to Park Street, switched to the Red Line, and got out at Kendall, and as I walked through Cambridge, I heard loud sirens. I looked behind me and saw a convoy of fire trucks rushing by. I thought it would be funny if they were going to the nuclear reactor, but I saw that they didn't go that way. However, when I got to the Francis Bitter Magnet Laboratory, I saw the fire trucks parked in front of the door, fire-fighters going in and out, police standing around the scene, and people crowded around, watching. Well, that was quite something--the first day arriving at my new job, and I see that the place is on fire. Eventually, I found Melissa, who said that she had no idea what was going on either. Soon the fire-fighters left and we entered the building. The graduate student who had shown us around the day before wasn't anywhere to be seen, and nobody else told us what to do, so we went to the library, trying to find things to read. The place was filled with textbooks about magnetism and thin films, rows of journals of applied physics, and some science-related magazines. We tried to find interesting things to read, often failed, and eventually came to the conclusion that we needed lunch. Well, there was nobody in sight, so we just left the building and had lunch at the MIT student center. Melissa went into a nearby bookstore to buy a book to read, and I remembered that I had brought a book with me. So we went back and read for a while. After some time, we wondered if anyone even knew that we were there, and if we should leave. We decided to look around for someone and at least notify him or her that we existed, and perhaps ask if we could leave. After we wandered through the halls for a while, past labs that smelled like smoke (left over from the fire perhaps?) we ran into our appointed graduate student. He made it quite clear that they didn't have anything for us to do, and that we could leave. So we did. Too bad I'm not getting paid for that.

-Philip