I finally started my summer internship at RIT yesterday!  After traveling about 6 hours from Connecticut to Rochester I was excited to meet the other interns and my advisor, Dr. Roger Dube.  I just couldn’t wait to experience what it is like to work in a real laboratory and research the topic that I have been studying for the last two years in my Authentic Science Research (ASR) program at school - solar storms.

It was fun to start our day by participating in a scavenger hunt that sent us to various landmark locations around the RIT campus.  Not only were we able to familiarize ourselves with the campus ,but we also learned more about each other and started becoming friends.  After the scavenger hunt we had a group discussion about the handbook that covered topics like attendance, attire, ground rules, and lunch breaks.  Afterwards, I was able to meet my advisor, Dr. Roger Dube.  He gave me some readings to complete over the summer and a laptop to do all my work on, and he even started teaching me about what I will be doing this summer which was really great!  Basically, I will be calculating the speeds of coronal mass ejections (CMEs) and then I will examine how solar wind affects those speeds to measure how long it takes for the CME to reach Earth.  It was a really awesome first day and it made me really excited to see what the rest of the summer has in store!

Today I attended our second group meeting at 8:45 this morning.  Some of the interns shared the work that they had already started and we also talked about how to get access cards for our specific labs.  The rest of the day I just spent researching coronal mass ejections that hit the Earth and, using measurements from SOHO, STEREO A, and STEREO B, I calculated the speeds of the coronal mass ejections. The coronal mass ejection that I studied today occurred on June 23, 2012.