Author: Francis Palustre, Email: palusf1@unlv.nevada.edu
Date Last Modified: 06/07/2024

This week I have mainly met the people of my team as I not really allowed to roam around as it is a government facility. Luckily, I am already acquainted with a PHD student who works there as he used to help a team I was in for an ASME competition that I was in back in sophomore year. For a new person, I met a guy named Ryan, swell person. Laid back and easy to talk to, so I didn't to think much about how to talk to him. Interestingly, he also likes 3D-printing and tends to use the printers at the site commonly. Albeit, he is not as know-it-all unlike me, but that doesn't matter as he said he is willing to learn about it.

Now this is very dependent of the week and project at DASL, but the biggest surprise to me was how there is a strong emphasis on working at one thing at a time. I am used to being told to work on multiple things by multiple people in a predictable basis, meaning how once someone is talking to me about a project of some sort, I assumed that I will be involved with them by helping, researching for them, or whatever. Here, I don't have that and I felt weird about it. Funny enough, when I asked what should be accomplished by next week, they told me to just focus on learning and not to worry about. Atleast, for now.

In my time at NNSS, I am trying to accept and learn the idea of slowing down, As a continuation of what was previously mentioned, I am used to almost be in a constant overdrive state. Now, that doesn't mean I am burnt-out or whatnot, I do enjoy the stuff I am doing here, but it does get stressful when I am expected to do so much in a short time-frame.

As this is still early in the internship, there hasn't been any noteworthy nor exciting projects that I have been tasked with. Although, that doesn't mean I wasn't given a task! Due to all the papers and documents I had to sign, I am not allowed to disclose what projects that I have been working on to even a small degree and this is further reinforced by both my manager and supervisor in my current team. What I can say is that I am currently CAD-ing and 3D-printing for my current project. So that never changed both in DASL and NNSS. Interestingly enough, my first prototype actually impressed my manager and supervisor in which they expected to be done in a week, but was done in a day. Anyway, right now, I am learning how to use Git as that is crucial to our project and I don't know why I, nor DASL, has not implemented this before. It is EXTREMELY useful in version control and basically allow people to work on the project at the same time, which is basically the reason why Git is so popular with developers. Also, despite many of us are very familiar with ROS1, we primarily use ROS2 because of how “better” it is. Luckily for me, I am already familiar with the new architecture, so learning a bit overtime is not that bad.