Week 7. Post 3.

 Have you seen ways in which your experience with the internship deepen your understanding of information technology or the connection of computing to other disciplines? 

I intern at NCAR (National Centre for Atmospheric Research) in one of their internship programs for various research and software development projects. NCAR is one of the sub-divisions of UCAR (University Centre for Atmospheric Research) and the way they incorporate each other is fascinating. This week we went to one Research Aviation Facility (RAF) Field trip which is one of the divisions of NCAR and is a national resource for the advancement of airborne research in the geosciences, with a focus on the safe operation of research aircraft in a wide variety of challenging sampling environments. 

When I first heard about this trip, I was very surprised that NCAR has divisions like this. When we came to RAF, I was very shocked by the fact that one organization can have so many facilities and management parts outside of the main office. When I saw all the research airplanes and all the instruments that they use for collecting and analyzing data - I was very impressed. 

Before coming to this internship, I thought that NCAR only has one lab and we will be doing software development in that lab. I would never imagine that there are so many office buildings that have planes that collect data in the sky. I always thought that a software engineering job is just always sitting in front of the PC and coding. However, this RAF trip has widened my horizons about the CS field - there are so many more things you can do out there. You can be a scientist who goes on those planes for data collection, you can be the engineer who prepares all the tools for data collection, you can be a product engineer who organizes all the scientific proposals and trips, and many more. I realized how CS is tightly connected to other fields such as physics, chemistry, and others. At NCAR, software engineers go with scientists on the plane to support some of the software that they use for collecting data and do so much more than just sitting in front of the PC and coding. This trip gave me a very big insight into the CS field in science. 

Next time, I will try to be more open-minded and think less stereotypical about certain jobs. I had this vision of software engineers as kind of a boring job as I thought they only sit and code 24/7; however, in the example of NCAR, I saw how CS can easily be applied and useful in other fields and how their job can be so interesting too. Next time I will try to objectively evaluate certain jobs and do more research about them before jumping into creating stereotypes in my head and being close-minded about it.