My Travels

A Day at NSCL

7:20am - Get up and go for a shower
The showers are very weird in my residence. Two single rooms share one washroom. Last night I thought that the other person had locked me out of the washroom. This morning I found out that was impossible... apparently the doors don't lock. They'll lock from the rooms, so you can keep your washroom-mate out of your room, but you can't prevent them from getting in the bathroom, even if you're using it. Fortunately the shower curtain is really opaque, and I'll just find other washrooms to go to. It's definitely an odd system!

8am - Breakfast!
I went down to the cafeteria. It's really neat, and somewhat different from the ones at MAC. They have all different kinds of cereal (in the boxes though), a place like sizzles, a salad bar, bagels, toast, english muffins, juice, etc. They have a lot of things that are really weird though. You can get just glasses of milk. It's kind of like a juice dispenser, but they have 3 different types of milk. I thought that was neat, since on campus you can only get milk in cartons. Another weird thing is that there's squeezable and spray on margerine. I thought that was insane, and slightly gross. I tried the squeezable stuff, and it wasn't too bad, but margerine or butter just shouldn't be like that, it's not meant to be in a bottle.

9am - Safety Training
This was just basic, and somewhat boring. We did get a small tour of one of the vaults though. After training we got our NSCL Badges. I'll have to take a picture and upload it tonight. The picture on my pass actually looks decent! I'm impressed

10am - Tour of NSCL
We had an unofficial tour given by one of the grad students. Honestly, the place is huge and impressive. There's so much equipment and probably millions of feet of cables (just think of how long it would take to coil all of that :P ). I don't understand how people could just invent this. It's so amazing to see. We're getting an official tour sometime early next week, so hopefully I'll be able to take some more pictures.

11am - Explanation of the Experiment
Finally, all the McMaster people sat down and Dr. Chen explained the purpose of the experiment to us. We'd all read the proposal, but it was very difficult to understand. What I know now is that we're looking at the properties of 26Si. We're looking to find what gamma rays are emmitted so that we can find the charge state, by comparing the decay pattern to that of the mirror nucleus 26Mg. Using this information the reaction rate for the production of 26Al from 26Si can be calculated. Since all of the other reaction rates leading to 26Al have been studied this is the last one. 26Al is important to Astrophysicists... I can't really remember why, though. Hey, I know half of this is probably wrong (so definitely don't quote me), but I think I understand it more than I did before our meeting.

12pm - Lunch & Shopping
We headed to the International Marketplace (or something) for lunch. I had Chinese (tasty). Afterwards we went into the "Spartan Bookstore". Oh my goodness, you can buy so much Spartan stuff. Honestly, they have golf tees, chairs, inflatable pool toys, a Monopoly game, Cheerleader's outfits for children, dog bowls, dog sweaters, mugs, flags, pennants, signs, posters, stuffed animals... everything. I was going to buy something ridiculous for Alex, but my good judgement got the better of me, plus, they didn't really have what I was looking for :(. Oh well, I know MAC does. :D

2:30pm - Work... or Ice Cream
We thought we should head back to the lab so that we could be useful but when we got to "Dat U-6" (where our experiment's computers are) there was a note on the whiteboard: "AS, BW, JL: Ice Cream social". So instead of working we went into the Atrium for $1 bowls of ice cream. Then we were told we didn't have to be back until the calibration runs at 5pm. It was pouring, though, so I stayed in the Atrium, relaxed, and did some IRC work. The rain is really nice. It's definitely cooled down because of it. Hopefully, the rain will go away and the cool temperature will stay so that I can go around the campus and take some pictures. It really is a beautiful campus.

I really like these trips. The work is fun, you learn so much, you get to explore the campus, and everything's paid for. I think Benji was right when he said "I'm definitely going to be O.D.ing on ice cream this week". Between the "MSU Dairy" (on campus made ice cream), Cold Stone ice cream, and these "Ice Cream Socials" I'm going to be eating tons of icecream. When I come back I may just be a ball with two stubby legs and two stubby arms attached I'll have gained so much weight from the icecream. I've had two huge bowls of icecream in the past day... fortunately my stomach isn't hurting too much.

I'd also like to mention that I've been seeing more girls around NSCL. The ratio is probably still well over 5 males : 1 female, but that's much better than 15:1! Plus, I think there's another female on our experiment team (the name is Ana, so I'm assuming that's a girl).

5pm (now) - Done for the day
The calibration runs are being postponed since someone else wants to use the DAQ so the Mac group is done for the day :) We're just hanging out in the WiFi zone checking e-mail, and we'll head out to dinner at 6 (hopefully we'll be hungry by then... the ice cream was pretty filling).

Labels: Michigan

posted by Jenn @ 5:30 PM