Hi! My name is Tessa Bailey and I am a 2021 Pintern from Montrose, Colorado. I will be working at the University of Utah with members of the Environmental Engineering Department and the Energy and Geoscience Institute.
I started the week on Monday getting introduced to my mentors and getting a tour of our office building as well as the lab I’ll be working in. Since I wasn’t able to get started in the lab right away, I was introduced to the coding language: Python. Since this language is becoming increasingly popular (mainly because it’s highly productive and efficient,) my mentors thought it would be the most relevant and fun to use. Once I learned the basics, Kevin, a postdoc I’m working with, introduced me to matplotlib, a graphing tool in python, which I began learning. The next day my mentors suggested I draw in matplotlib to learn the software more. I started easy with a smiley face, but once I got more confident I drew the cowabunga hand sign.
Then after lunch at the Union, Zhidi, another postdoc I’m working with, taught me the basics of groundwater flow and Toth’s problem. As I wasn’t going to be able to work in the lab the whole week, we decided coding the analytical solution of Toth’s problem would be my task. On Wednesday I started coding. This process was 20% actually coding and 80% googling how to. My mentors assured me this was normal and actually good to be finding my own answers to solve my many problems. And also seeing that I have been coding for only 2 days before that, I was starting strong. I spent the next two days coding and googling and asking my mentors questions, and finally on Friday I finished!
Toth’s problem and this graph represents groundwater flow from the high hydraulic head to low head in a basin. The yellow in the graph represents the highest head and the purple represents the lowest. The arrows represent the flow, which is always from high head to low head.
The weekend before I started, my parents drove up on Saturday with me. That night we walked around downtown and saw some really cool architecture!
We also ate some really good sushi at Itto Sushi!
And we stumbled upon a really cool amphitheater with a jazz/blues group performing for Juneteenth!
On our way back my mom’s feet started to hurt so obviously I had to give her a piggy back ride.
For the rest of my week much of my downtime was spent reading and going to various new dinner places with my lovely host family. Such as Red Robin where we ate an immense amount of fries and fry sauce and soft pretzel bites. At another place, I tried custard for the first time, and I was pleasantly surprised that is was actually good! Saturday I went with my host family to a huge mall where I saw stores that, coming from a small town, I had only shopped at online! And on Sunday I went mountain biking which was super fun and cool!
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