Thursday, July 7, 2011

Day 1-Wednesday 7/6

As I woke up earlier than I had all summer, I opened my eyes and thought about the new experience that would start in a few hours.  Surprisingly, I wasn't too nervous.  Yes, I had a few butterflies, but it was nothing compared to the usual feeling of panic when new, unknown things start.  I got up and got ready, extremely tired.  Then I got in the car with my dad, and we started driving.

After some one way roads and traffic, we finally made it.  He walked me into the building, and Emily was sitting outside the reading room.  My dad left for work, and I started talking to her.  I felt much better having another person to talk to, and my butterflies disappeared.  Other people got there eventually, and we went into the Reading Room to wait.  Prati, my fellow MVRL intern, wasn't there yet which worried me a little.  Joe and Bob came in and started talking about how it would be this summer.  

Prati got there a few minutes late, and then we started a scavenger hunt!  I love scavenger hunts, so I was very excited even though this one promised to be very difficult.  Elaine, Alex, Matt, Evelyn, and I were in the group called Remotely Senseless.  We first decided to look around the building, and we immediately found Bethany.  Then we walked around and found a few of the pictures we were looking for.  After looking around for a little while longer and asking people for help, we decided to explore the art building.  Even though we didn't find anything there, we did find a nice man who gave us a map of RIT.  We would have been very lost without it!  We continued going through buildings and asking people where things were.  It was REALLY hot outside, and I had worn jeans expecting to be in air conditioning all day.  My favorite part was going back to the same room in the engineering building 3 times in search of a drill that we never found.  By 11:30, we'd found about 25 out of 36 and we decided to go back to the imaging building to start uploading our videos.  Our plan was to let it upload for about 5 minutes then split up: three of us would stay in the computer lab working on the movie, and two of us would continue finding things.  I volunteered to go find things with Elaine because I've never used a Mac before, and I knew I'd be much more helpful finding things.  Unfortunately, the uploading was supposed to take a half an hour that we couldn't waste.  Elaine and I decided to use her phone's camera instead of the camera Joe gave us to at least get some partial credit.  At this point, it was about 11:45, and we visited Bethany.  She gave us tips to find many of the remaining things we had to find, and we rushed off to find them.  We had to make it all the way to Global Village to find one thing (we'd already been there about an hour earlier and I was annoyed we hadn't looked closer), so we decided we had no choice but to run.  Like I said before, it was really hot out! Elaine and I were drenched with sweat by the time we returned, having found 8 of the missing 11.  We ran back to this building, and we had about ten minutes to spare.  I emailed the videos on Elaine's phone to my email, and Evelyn, Matt, and Alex figured out how to put them in the complete video.  We were a few minutes late because it took a long time to turn into a movie, but Elaine and I used the waiting time to catch our breaths.  When it was done, we went back to the Reading Room fairly confident that we'd won with all of our extra efforts.  We all watched the videos, and Remotely Senseless was declared the winner!  I do think the Astrologists on Coffee had the better, more entertaining video, but we found more of the pictures!  

After eating, they took us to our labs and I was kind of nervous again because that was when we'd actually be starting work.  Joe took us to Karen and Jeff, who were very nice to us.  We set up wiki accounts, and then we learned how to use the eye trackers and Yarbus.  Luckily, I took notes after we'd seen it once and I think I'll be able to do it today when we practice!

At 5, I went home with my dad and I was even more tired after my first 8 hour day of work that included lots of running.  I ate, showered, and went to bed as soon as I possibly could!

It was a very fun first day, and I think this summer is going to be a wonderful new experience!

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