Gregor Remec, LASP Software Development Training, Week One!

Hey everyone, I’m Greg Remec and I’m from Telluride High School. This past week was huge as I moved up to Boulder, Colorado and got settled in with my super nice host family, and intense internship. On Memorial Day (May 27th), I drove up to Boulder with my bike on the back rack and got ready to start my internship at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics or LASP.

Meeting my host family (the Coulter-Clarks) was awesome. They are a family of four with a beautiful house and two awesome energetic kids, Shay and Quinn. The parents, Eben and Jean are insanely welcoming and kind. The living situation is amazing and I can get anywhere I want by bike.

I woke up Tuesday morning ready to go. I had an email from my LASP mentor David Wescott saying to meet him at 9:00 at the LASP main building, on east campus in Boulder. I brought my bike because I knew LASP was only a few miles from the Coulter-Clark house, so at around 8:00 I left home; I knew that I’d get lost on the way and wanted to give myself some room for error. The bike ride was great and with frequent map checks I was at LASP in only 35 minutes. Boulder has great bike paths.

I waited around in the LASP lobby and looked at the mock satellites and rockets hanging from the ceiling. This is the view from where I eat lunch, all those things hanging are miniature satellites.

When David arrived I realized I lucked out again, he was super nice and gave me a tour of the building. LASP has one cool office, there were all sorts of things going on–from where they assemble satellites to the mission control room. When David showed me my work station, it was super cool. I am in a program with 12 other interns, we all share a medium-sized room. All the other interns are Juniors in college or higher, up to grad students. The interns are super nice and they love programming. The work is super challenging and rewarding, but getting up to speed is taking some time. Luckily I sit within 20 feet of some extraordinary programmers so I can get help on anything I want. This is my work station, where I sit next to two masters degree students.

The internship program is usually given to college students who are going to work at LASP, NASA or other Military/Government sites and need to do training to be able to complete applications that can help in anything from ground communication to rocket software.  All week I worked on a script parsing project that, long story short, was way harder than expected but wicked cool. I learned everything from how to set up Linux Mint to doing intro git commands from command line, and remembering/learning how to code in python is very challenging. It is super fun to work with people who are so much more experienced than I am and I really think I am getting true work experience.

Outside of the internship there’s a bunch to do too, but I will save that for next week’s blog. I get outside a lot and Boulder is endless fun.