I regret to inform the reader that this will be the last post on this blog. I'd like to thank CIS and RIT for this opportunity and the knowledge, experience, and paycheck I gained. Wish me luck on my presentation (I'm first.) Interns, it's been good. I'm off to play some volleyball. Peace.

Ahh, smells like monday.

So today, I went to cross country practice, where a few of my teammates and I were conned into an eleven mile run by my coach, but despite its duration and resulting pain, the run was surprisingly fullfilling.

Now, at RIT, I'm finishing up the web page, and writing a word document for the person who takes over from me about how I planned to do things. Also, I spent a few hours this morning working on my presentation for the end of the year. So this internship winds down, and I post less.

I ran this morning with the team. We packed into a bus and went to Mendon Ponds. We do this two or three times a season, and as a veteran member, I know the trails, and look forward for our glorified cross country tag games. Now, when all is said and done, at most you can be a mile and a half from where the bus parks. So, at reasonable pace, it may take you twelve minutes to go from the farthest point on the trails back to home base.

However, one unnamed member of our team, succeeded in getting himself lost, and stayed out for more than an hour after he was supposed to return. How, I ask? This kid must have ran almost to the road, and then turned around before he got there, and then turned around, got near the road, and went another way. How can you get yourself that lost on a two hundered acre trail site?

Well, I'll leave that one to the running gods, and make another bloody pig sacrifice to them for giving me a sense of direction.


Ah yes, this blog is about work. Well, the afore-mentioned fiasco of searching for our disoriented teammate put me here at RIT around noon, at which time I dove into web page design. As I work, I keep saving in dreamweaver, so I can "test" out the pages in the various browsers I have installed here. However, I now know that this may be a bad practice. I changed the layout on a lot of the pages, only to realize I liked the old layout, but alas! This layout was lost with my saving and bastardization of the original design. So from now on, I think I'll have multiple copies of the page on the machine, each with their different approach, so I won't loose the decent thing that I decided to upgrade, but actually made worse.

My mother always says "leave well enough alone," but this time, I didn't. I changed "well enough." She, like myself, has a tendency to be a perfectionist. The more I revise, the more jumbled my code becomes, and the more tired my eyes become. Actually, writing this blog is a direct result of me not leaving well enough alone. I changed a lot, didn't like the changes, and became so frustrated I had to break. In a few minutes, I may start again. I fear I may not have a good finished product for the LIAS lab at the conclusion of this internship.

Farewell, my reader, (if you even exist, I never know whether people really read this) and have a pleasant day.

So this week is running practice in the morning, and I'm only in from 11-5, but tomorrow practice was moved to 2pm, so then I'll be in from about 7 -1:30.

I don't think I've posted in a while, it has been busy. But I'm working on the same things: the web page for LIAS, my presentation, and the paper. I want to make this webpage real good, but I only have a few days now, so I don't know how finished and polished it will be. Right now I'm taking images from a powerpoint, pasting them into photoshop, and resizing them and resaving them for the web. Tedius, but necessary. The internship feels as if it's winding down, and I'm kind of anxious to have some more time for a necessary summer activity, nothing.

Yo, sorry I haven't updated in a while. Everything's going similarly. I'm working on my presentation, and the new webpage. Although I think the data in my presentation is sufficient, the layout and aesthetics need some help. I want to get that done, so I can focus on the webpage

I went and talked to Jason (not my buddy, but a guy who works in LIAS (Laboratory for Imaging Algorithimas and Systems), about the web page and gave him my preliminary ideas. Basically, I'll do a template, with a table of links that include Home, Projects, People, Images, and contact. Then, I'll make these pages. I started working on the buttons, but they were turning out bad lookings, because resolution was too poor on the text

This week, I have "band camp" all week, and therefore will be here at RIT only for the morning. I'm in the drumline and play snare, and as a member of the coolest section in the band, I don't consider myself much of a "band geek". Anyway, here at work, I'm beginning to plan my presentation for the end of the internship. Additionally, I went up to see the "Wasp" people regarding the webpage and was provided with all the files that the previous builder of the webpage left behind. I encountered slight problems however, in that this unknown first attempter used a lot of flash(via Fireworks) for buttons and the like, but the "Fireworks" program in our lab is disfunctional. I think I may go to the system Adminstrator people and see if they can get me a working copy. Dr Maria has a copy, but she is out of town, and I need the System Administrator privledges to install it anyway.

So, because of band camp, and next week the start of Cross Country, My time here will be limited, and my workload is considerably decreased. I plan on making this webpage (and therefore learning more about flash and the real webpage design stuff), organizing and analyzing the paper data I've collected, and presenting on the 24.

So Thursday, I spent the majority of my time assistint Niranjan in a simulation on Matlab. Although I must admit I was not much of a help as far as programming is concerned, I hope I provided logical and moral support to Niranjan. As one whose had those feelings of bashing in the computer monitor with my fist, I know it helps to have someone to confer with besides that white plastic menace who rarely helps and of whom you become very, very frustrated at times. After that, I was summoned up to the third floor to talk to Mr. Pow and Mr. Calliens for reasons unknown. At first I though I was in trouble, maybe some kind of timecard problem. Either it was Mr. Callens tone of voice, or the chloroform soaked rag and nightstick he was carrying, but I had that "in trouble" feeling.

No worries, they just wanted me and Jason's (I don't know who to say that grammatically correct, sorry) imput on the internship program and recruitment for the center, of which I tried to provide.

Today, I spent the morning helping Niranjan again, than attended the ultrasound group meeting. Right after lunch, I spent some time trying to help Jason with his IDL code, but after using a lot of matlab, I had syntax confused, (in addition to my lack of programming knowledge) and was no help at all. After that, I spent some time organizing data, performing scans, and generating images. In my persuit to store data, I also had to make the external harddrive work, which required some help from the system administrator guy.

I was also informed that my services are wanted with the forest fire "wasp" group for web page creation. I'll try to make a good one, but it is only my second. Sianara.

On this bright morning, I spent time compressing files, cleaning the hard drive, and burning data on to cds, as 17 gigabytes worth of data is probably more than an intern should consume. Afterwards, I attended the lunch lecture series (the 2nd to last), but was somewhat disappointed. Besides the free lunch, the talks were boring and unimpressive. Why are people so concerned with mathematical modeling of nearly random events like jamming of a hopper and transmission of Chlamydia. Common sense will dictate that yes, hoppers jam more regularly with smaller openings and bigger grains, and yes, chlamydia is going to spread. Why would one want to derive some complex function and plot the relationship, and say flat out, "this is not accurate," or "the results are not consistent?" like the presenters did. Why do math majors bother creating expressions for these events?
Anyway, there are so many variables in both of these studies. Hell, the weather could affect Chlamydia's spread (Some do not fornicate during a rainy years). I'm sure that jammed states do have some value for mining and petroleum extraction, but when in nature is the soil composed of uniformly sized acrylic rods?

I'm sorry to ramble about these people's research, and yes I'm being hypocritical, as my own research has no more value than these other projects. --------

So I did a few more scans in the afternoon, and then we rearranged the lab a little bit. It is now slightly cleaner, but still cluttered.

a bientot

Today, I spent some time conferring with a high school teacher from Virginia about his imaging science elective, saw a doctorial thesis presentation at U of R, and played volleyball, all while the ultrasound scanning system was hard at work. I'm building a stock of images now, and hope to see some clear patterns and differences between the toner samples and the clean samples.

The doctorial presenation was very interesting. It made me very curious and brought to mind many questions. I'd elaborate, but, alas, I'm on recess from volleyball and must return.

Today was cool. I started an ultrasound scan early in the morning, then spent some time helping Niranjan like I do on Mondays. Although Dr. Maria was supposed to be gone today, she was here, and is instead leaving next week.

Coolness began after lunch, when I went to the math department to score some free monitors for the lab. Now I'm typing on a computer whose monitor is not dark dreary and out of focus, but one that is bright cheery and crisp. What an improvement.

Then I went to the "hub"(right next to crossroads), where I spent more than an hour trying to print my template on odd and small sized pieces of paper. As I sat there, watching a two inch square piece of paper glued onto another, larger paper, being fed into a no doubt million dollar machine --that was more than likely to jam and possibly break the printer-- I thought about all the Xerox engineers who probably spent months trying to safeguard the machine against idiots who would try to run a dirty mess of paper held together by gluesticks through their fancy copier. As the paper was in the machine, I could just here the repairman on the other end of the phone, "you put what through that thing," and the higher ups at RIT, "how will I print my form mail for prospective students!!!!!?"

But, after holding by breath multiple times, our creative engineering worked, and I laser printed some ink on my paper samples. Shout out to the guy at the hub, even though I cannot recall your name and you won't read this. It was quite humorous to see a couple of kids and Dr. Maria using gluesticks and scissors to make an automated machine do what we wanted. Ah the marvels of technology.

Tomorrow we'll talk again. Until, make the women hot and the music loud. Oh yeah, on the first entry I wanted this blog to have literary value. I retract this statement, as this blog has none.

Yeah, Friday.

This morning, I was a participant in the visual perception lab's experiment where I had to find symmetry in these images. It was cool. I'd like to know more about how the brain processes images.

After that, I sat in on the Ultrasound Imaging department's meeting, where complex topics sailed over my head. I now realize how little of mathmatics I comprehend, and am anxious to learn more about these complex ideas which I vaguely understand. I think I'll like calculus.

Then, I returned to my lab where it was more of the same, scanning, making images, thinking about the images, and doing this blog. Jason came down at the end of the day and we had some scholarly conversation. TGIF.

Today was allright. I continued scanning the new paper samples with the laser toner deposited on them, but was somewhat disappointed with the results. I hoped to see a fundamental shift in the mechanical properties of the paper between the ink covered and inkless paper. However, that is not really the case. Although I cannot resolve where the ink starts and stops, the new scans of the inked paper are very different than the previous scans. It is possible that the hot rollers and drums of the copy machine changes the structure of all the paper, not just the part which received toner.

Anyway, I'm anxious to gather more data. The only problem is that now I'm scanning larger areas of the paper, which results in a much longer scan.

Tomorrow I volunteered to participate in the visual perception lab's experiment,which should be interesting. Ahh, chicago on the radio. My head hurts, too much time infront a computer screen. Time to mountain bike.

Today, we visited coopervision in Scottsville. ALthough the technology behind contact lenses is advanced, I was surprised to see how labor intensive the manufacturing process was. They had people performing repetitive tasks, but first they had to load the lenses into some kind of tray, and after had to put the lenses in stacks for the next person on the line. It seemed like there was a lot of wasted time and energy during the manufacturing process. Despite any wasted manpower, coopervisioin was still able to have a 70% profit margin. Why change something that has such lucrative results?

Afterwards, I had to print some kind of template onto my paper samples for the next phase of testing. We decided to just use the "guppi" copier on the second floor(why do they name them all after fish?). That was fine, except some of the samples on to which I was printing were heavily coated, and some of them were not eight and a half by eleven inch sheets. To my dismay, the machine could not copy onto these coated sheets, especially when they were odd sizes. So I jammed it, repeatedly.

Bottom line, I need to find out how to laser print onto these small sheets, but I had enough uncoated whole sheets to keep me busy for a while. I'm going mountain biking with JD tomorrow. Sweetness

Although not altogether super-productive, the day nevertheless had its share of productivity.

The meeting I mentioned earlier went very well, and although we haven't pinpointed exactly what we're seeing in the paper, we have some intriguing hypotheses. Since in a laser printer, upwards of twenty sheets are printed per minute, and on each ther are thousands of lines of characters who are applied to the paper in microseconds, the 1mhz frequency ultrasound may very well mimick what happens when paper is printed, and therefore may unlock a secret to paper which conventional paper testing (with relatively no frequency and with apparti that sound like logging equipment) does not show.

My next step is to get some repeatability (sorry no science lingo). I'm going to scan bigger areas more times. I think that with a larger area, paper which had relatively no pattern will start to show some. (after all, Tomorrow we're going to prepare more samples, with ink lines and words on them for more effective scanning.everyting could be considered periodic.

So peace until the morrow.

Yesterday, like last monday, I spent the day working with Niranjan on the wrist scanning. Good times. After some trial and error, we formed some decent images.

At this moment, I'm awaiting a ten O'clock meeting with the professor who has done the optical study of the papers on which I've been collecting data. Hopefully, we can make sense of the images I created when we learn the structual characteristics of the paper.

Today I finished scanning the paper (sigh of relief). These images are the product of my toil. Note, the internet changed the coloring, they look better as genuine bitmaps, and the colors transition smoothly unlike the jumpiness seen here. Also note, this square is really smaller than a centimeter, so it is zoomed in a lot (pixel size in real life .3mm x .3mm). Note again, that the lines in the image are partially the system, and partially weird stuff that went on when blogspot changed them into internet colors. There are eighteen others like them. Despite the fact that they look worse on my blog than they do in real life, they are small, have poor resultion, and seem like insufficient results for my toil. But hey, that's ultrasound, especially at 1mhz.

I was worried that the images I was forming from the data were inconsistent, but after changing setting on the oscilloscope and repeating a scan again on the last piece of paper, the resulting image was nearly identical. This is proof that the images are consistent, and do show some undisguiseable characteristic of the paper. In other words, good news. We're going to talk to the guy whose been doing some optical study of the paper on tuesday. Until then, I have to organize and present the images I found to him (and Maria wants me to send the images to Mr. Pow for something that I forgot).

Right now I'm listening to some Niel Young. Out of the classic rock icons, he's the most underrated. I love "hey hey my my." What a fantastic song. After lots of searching, I finally found a internet radio station that will play more than one acceptable song at a time. After Niel was some America "Horse With No Name." Can't beat it as far as classic rock is concerned. Thank you "100.5 classic rock"!!

Added some links to the sight and changed the text to the website. Plus, I can now edit html with ease (I'm doing it right now on the blog).

Sorry that there are typographical errors, poor grammer, run on sentences, sentence fragments, and missing pronouns (like I), and parantheses, and three "and"s in a row --- It's friday.

ps I put in correct code to make "website" a link, but I think blogspot doesn't want that.

Today was fairly productive. I have nearly finished scanning both sides of my paper. That's awesome. Additionally, the webpage is coming along well. I'm starting to get into a routine here and feel comfortable.

At lunch I went and took care of my parking ticket, luckily I didn't have to pay anything, even though I did leave my pass at home.

Check out the preliminary web page. Tell me if there are any broken links Here's the page

I did some more scanning today, and the pattern is becoming even more pronounced.
I also revamped the web page, and added a fancy collage. Good times.

At lunch, I went to the lunch chat at the college of science, which was pretty interesting. The genetics research about hearing loss was particularly cool. That kind of research about health problems seems the most valuable to me. Its awesome how undergrads have access to all the equipment for such research.

I spent the day scanning paper with the ultrasound and working on the web page. I scanned four different papers, and am starting to see a pattern. It seems that glossy paper, in additiong to reflecting a lot of light, reflects a lot of ultrasound too. the unglossy paper yields very different images than the glossy paper. Cool. Oh yeah, a tour group came by. I'm Going to play volleyball momentarily (that's why this entry is short).

As decided earlier, the ultrasonic imagery lab was devoted to Niranjan's research, which was the purpose of the afore mentioned field trip. So, today we worked on that. We tested my arm contraption with the inquisition style (or kneepad) brace. It worked fine. Then, I pretty much spent the rest of the day trying to fine tune a MATLAB program, which wasn't too incredibly successful. Although Niranjan and I did not finish the program, we have a clear idea what we need to do, and how to do it. I have little programming experience, but through a lot of trial and error, and even more consultations of the help file, I'm starting to understand Matlab. It is so cool how easy it is to make visually appealing programs with the software. Although I would like to be proficient in programming, I reckognize that this tedious, boring, and often frustrating task is something I do not want to do for a living.
I didn't pick Jason up for lunch, I hope he didnt' have to eat alone.

Representing from Ultrasound.

Today was cool. Field trip in the morning to this Melles Griot facility where they make optics equipment. It was the first time I've ever entered a clean room, before this, the only contact I've had with such rooms was from a 50s cold war film. This company made really really precise equipment in small quantities. I guess they kind of exemplify where industry is going in this country. I think they call it "post industrial" economy, where things become increasingly technical and specialized, and where information, rather than products, is what drives the marketplace. As the tour guide said, high volume production is moving to China and other devolping nations, and America is moving toward such highly skilled applications of manufacturing.

After the tour of the facilty, we then had some presentations by the engineers there. I understood most of the physics they talked about, and now saw the real world applications of all they I studied with my eccentric Physics teacher Dr. Baieve, whom I just remember I have to call. I get on that. Peace.

This morning, we performed a particularly entertaining experiment, where we sat in the dark and let our eyes adapt, went out while covering one eye into the light, and then returned to the darkness to open both eyes.

What we found, was that the eye that was covered was still adjusted to seeing in the dark, while the other eye was still blind.

This led us to the question, can one eye see scotopically while the other sees photopically?

So I looked up these words and found that scotopcally is ability to see in the dark, and photopically the opposite. Oddly enough, I found this information on a marksmanship page called "vision and shooting." That' hilarious.

I also found that it takes thirty minutes for the rods in our eye to be fully adapted to darkness, so we probably should have stayed in the room longer (which would have inevitably led to sleep). Although so far the internet has not validated this, based on our experiment, I think it is possible to have one eye adapted to light and one to darkness. Each eye operates independently, although both send their signals to the visual cortex. Focusing, aperture, and other eye functions happen separately in both eyes, as shown when you shine a light into one eye, that pupil, and only that pupil contracts. Likewise, eyes are different, people have eyes that see in different colors, have worse vision, or cannot see at all. When you look at something close up, the distances to each eye are different, so each eye has to focus independently to have a true focused image. All of these things show that eyes operate independently. Why can't the retina operate independtly too, so that one eye is adapted to darkness, and the other to light?

I'll do a bit more research, but based on some intial logic nad research, it seems that yes, one eye can wokr scotopically and the other can work photopically.

Now, I must talk a little about how the research is going.

There is a lot to understand in how the data is collected, and further how this data is made into an image which I now know, but I won't go into it.

As of yet, I've done 3 ultrasound scans: one on one piece of paper, and the other two on another piece of paper. After converting the data I collected into an image, though, we've hit a roadblock. There is severe banding on the images, alternating a band of light pixels, and then a band of darker pixels. We've attributed this to malfunctions in the motor. Additionally, the program which renders the image does so at the point of maximum ultrasound amplitude returning to the tranducer. This maximum amplitude may not be the place we want to image.

Right now, I'm scanning a less glossy piece of paper to see if gloss has caused the problems in the image, but I don't think that is the case. I'm going to try changing the size of the image I collect with the distance between measurements. Right now, I have 250 micrometers in between ultrasound pulse and echo measurements. Maybe, this is just a bad increment for the motors to move, and is causing banding in the images. My next image will be collected with 225 micrometers, and the one after that with 315 micrometers. Hopefully, one of these values will yield images of better quality, from which we can see some sort of pattern, a pattern which won't make this work a waste of time.

Another possible fix for our problem is to change motors, but we need a computer interface to control these motors and do the scanning. I know very little about computer programming, so if a new program is to be made, it won't be by me, unless I could hook up to a computer and learn things like they do in the matrix.

Sorry this blog is so incredibly dry, next post I'll try to make have more literary value and humor.

Today was long.

But I got a free lunch while watching undergrad research presentations. mmmm pizza and subs.

I was kind of dissapointed with the research. For instance, those kids who were testing bacteria in turtles for antibiotic resistance? They didn't know anymore than I do about the subject, and I've not even taken AP bio. Worse, they didn't even have a hypothesis, they were just testing for the sake of testing. Then the math students working on the tiling, don't even try to tell me that has real world applications. It doesn't. This kind of rules out math as a major in college, though I'll certainly take lots of calculus.

But then again, these were undergrads, kids not much older than I. If these kids get funding for their research, then I'm sure there really are undergrad research opportunities. I'll come up with some sweet research project when I'm in school.

peace

Since I've not posted in a few days, I will here try to provide a summary of what I've done.


Friday's Post Lunch Adventure
After lunch on Friday, Maria, Niranjan, Dr. Rao, and some others traveled to a facility on John Street just off campus, where we took various pictures of our fore arms with a sophisticated camera system equipped with a special electronic filter which can choose light wavelegnths by the nanometer. The camera took gray scale images of our arms each at wavelegnths from 430nm to 750nm. The operator of this camera was named Nick, and he's been working on the system for someone in the private sector. We spent a long time trying to reduce digital noise produced at high magnifications because of differences in pixels, and realized that the noise is the same every time, so that it can be electronically removed.

While Nick and the professors calibrated the instrument and conversed, I ask a lot of questions to learn more about the camera and how it works. Then we put our arms inside this box, and took the pictures, then went home.

Monday
I spent my morning working on the web page, and after frequent consultations to the Dreamweaver manual and an HTML tutorial I found on the internet, I now am proficient in Dreamweaver and have HTML understanding. I was elated when source code that I edited actually did what I planned. Otherwise, the day was uneventful.

Tuesday
Although I didn't mention it earlier, we took the multispectral images on Friday with the hopes of then taking ultrasound images and comparing the two. However, a problem arose when we tried to take the ultrasound images. With the equipment we have, it takes a long time (sometimes longer than 20 minutes) to do an effective ultrasound scan with any kind of resolution. I know from experience that it is nearly impossible to keep still for this kind of time.

However, to this problem I helped find an effective remedy. We needed some kind of brace to hold our arms during the imaging. No problem, I thought. I brought in street hockey pads my mom purchased for me when she was in some kind of safety funk. These child streethockey pads would be perfect for adult arm immobilization while we took the images. We need to affix the pads to some kind of board to continue, and could not do this today because they were waxing the floors in our buildings' shop and Raj had left with the key to the workshop in the College of Science.

After theorizing about the hockey pad brace, Niranjan and I then set up a shared folder to move data from the computer which runs the tranducer and collects initial data to the computer where we'll due the image production and analysis of the data. This took some trial and error, but we figured it out.

After this, we then affixed our tranducer to the motors which will move the tranducer around.

Basicall, the tranducer is connected to computer controlled motors which can move in very small increments. These motors move the tranducer around in a pattern called a raster scan, which is similar to the pattern old tv's used with their cathoyd rays. The computer detects the results and eventually(I'll explain later) an image is made.

Today was decent. I spent the morning in Kindergarten nostalgia. I had to cut out rectangles of the paper we'll be imaging, and glue a tongue depressor frame around the paper. Although this seems simple, it was. I was careful not to get glue where we'll be measuring, and built some nice frames, albeit not to pretty. On the frames I wrote which paper it was and which side it was (signified by top and bottom).

After this, I spent a few minutes fiddling with Dreamweaver (the software I'm using to create the webpage) and few minutes practicing some HTML source code, and then grabbed lunch. Lunch was spent in an official looking meeting room, where Jason and I ate while passerbys shot confused glances our way. We spent the whole lunch waiting for the construction workers out side to pore cement, only to realize they were only pouring a few gallons into a post hole. How anticlimactic.

After lunch was very interesting, but I'll elaborate later

As I said, I'm working in the Ultrasonic Imagery laboratory, in the basement of the building. Dr. Mari Helguera is my mentor, and my primary research for the summer will be about paper, and using ultrasonic imagery to better understand paper. Secondarily, I'll be developing a web page for a textbook Dr. Helguera has written. Since I have relatively no experience in HTML or in web page design, this will be a valuable learning experience and skill I'll need in today's internet driven world.

On the first day, I met Dr. Helguera after the Red Barn activities (I'd elaborate, but I'm not going to), and was introduced to my tasks for the summer, which I summed up in the first paragraph of this entry. She then gave me the book Diagnostic Ultrasound: Priniples and Instruments, and instructed me to read the first few chapters. THis book will help me to understand exacly how and why the equipment I'll be using works.

Today, I spent a few hours reading this textbook. I learned all about how the ultrasound imaging systems work. I will go on to describe how our system works, but the ones in the doctor's office are different. Basically, there is a transducer (like a speaker) to which alternating voltage is provided. This voltage results in deformation of the transducer, which further results in a series of compression waves at a high frequencey (ultrasound.) Because the current varies sinosoidally, the waves also can be represented by the sign curve, the positive Y axis representing compression in the ultrasound wave and peak voltage, and the negative Y axis representing rarefactions and minimum voltage.

These ultrasound waves go and hit whatever you want to image, and then are reabsorbed by the tranducer. This absorbtion amounts to the emission in reverse. The tranducer is deformed, which results in voltage. This entire process takes a few thousands of a second, and the returnign voltage is read by an oscilloscope.

You don't care about this. Bottom line, I understand this stuff.



Oh yeah, after reading, Maria came down. I asked her questions and actually saw the equipment in action. I then went to working on the webpage in Dreamweaver. I got the manual to Dreamweaver, and eventually, I know I'll figure the program out.

I ambled up those hard cement steps in front of the Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science on that cool, crisp, July morning, filled with anxious expectation about what came next. I nervously grabbed the cold steal door handle, and opened the door on my summer job as an intern in the ultrasonic Imagery lab at RIT.

This wasn't the first time I'd been on campus or in that building, but nevertheless, I felt like I was opening up a new page in my life, growing up a little, and beginning an experience that would shape my life to come. Yes, I was still nervous.

We assembled in the lobby, and I tried to break the silence, but most likely just babbled while annoying the other tired teenage interns. Luckily as the day wore on, the apprehension wore off. After our tour, the building wasn't dark and foreboding, and after the Red Barn activities, I realized my colleagues were smart interesting kids who were very similar to me.

Enough with the philosophic garble. This blog, as directed by my superior's here at RIT, will describe my internship experience. I'll try to make it interesting and would like for it to have some kind of literary value.