First Blog: Listening with a Keen Ear
My internship is different from others in this program, yet I am learning just as much as the rest. My work is not really research oriented, which is the major difference between my work and the work of other interns in this program. Going into this internship, I honestly thought I would be bored and that I would not learn much. In truth, listening to a description of what I do makes it seem boring. My job: I listen to podcasts in the Branner Earth Sciences Library about various topics and transcribe them. This may seem boring and exhausting, but it actually isn’t. The podcasts are very interesting and the topics discussed are intriguing. In addition, typing down information is actually a great way to learn, and the podcasts have taught me a lot.
So far, I have transcribed three podcasts on three unique topics. The first was an interview with Professor Marcus Feldman at Stanford, who talked about the evolution and migration of races. He explained that from Africa, small groups of people split off and migrated to Europe and Asia, and these groups also split and migrated to the Americas. The result of this is that the genetic variation in the population of the Americas is much smaller than that of Africa and even Asia. The second podcast was an interview with a scientist who is part of the team that worked on the Curiosity rover that went to Mars. He talked about the obstacles faced, and how they overcame the problems. One point which was interesting to me in that podcast was that he showed that the reason for visiting Mars with a rover were not to see if there was life on Mars in the past, but if life was in fact possible on Mars at all. The third podcast talked about the access and availability of food across the globe and the effect of food on the environment.
These podcasts have increased my understanding of their respective topics tremendously, and I hope that the podcasts that I listen to in the future will do the same for me.
Second Blog
Through 5 weeks of this internship, I have greatly enjoyed my time at Stanford. I have listened to some very interesting podcasts, but I have encountered some difficulties while transcribing. One obstacle was understanding what the speaker was saying after slowing the pace by about 40%. This, unfortunately, makes the deep voices deeper and at times unintelligible. This also made it especially hard to listen to the speakers with different accents because I was not used to some of the linguistic differences. However, it has become easier to understand the podcasts as I gain more experience and work on more podcasts.
Obstacles aside, one moment which I really enjoyed and appreciated was when Sonia and I got to meet the creators and producers of this podcast series, Generation Anthropocene, Mike Osborne and Miles Traer. They talked about the beginnings of the project and how the series has evolved from season to season. They also expressed that they want to make shorter podcasts which highlight the important points in a previous podcast. They expressed their gratitude towards us and I really enjoyed talking about the different podcasts with them.
Third Blog: The End
In the past 8 weeks, I have learned a lot of skills and information. One day, Miles Traer, one of the creators of the Generation Anthropocene series that I transcribed, taught me and Sonia a little bit about audio production. There were a lot of cool features in Audacity that I didn’t even know existed! One feature allowed you to select only certain types of sound waves so that you could make the audio sound like it was coming out of a telephone or a walkie-talkie. I later went and played around with Audacity and had a lot of fun with it.
The final presentations were all very interesting and informative. There was a wide variety of research, but as Jenny mentioned, a lot of the research had to do with isotopes. I found this particularly interesting as in school, there is almost no focus on isotopes, even in my AP Chem class. My presentation was very basic but I covered everything I wanted to. Funny thing is that I was the only one who did not use a visual presentation, which is both scary and fun. Overall, I felt all the research was summed up really well by all the interns and they responded fairly well to the questions they were asked
These past 8 weeks have been some of the most fun and valuable times of my life. I have learned a lot during this internship, not just from my work, but from my new friends and the Wednesday sessions. If I had not been a part of this experience, I honestly have no idea what I would have done during this summer. I would probably be playing video games most of the day, which may be as fun as this internship, but would definitely not provide the great memories and experiences that I had this summer. In conclusion, I want to thank Jenny and Amy, my supervisor, for this opportunity as well as everyone else involved in the programs for a great summer experience.