Pity the poor IT Girl, she is nobly cracking on with composing a witty blog entry despite the temperature outside passing the 30°C mark. Being trapped in a powerfully air conditioned office for most of the day has prevented me from enjoying the weather, as river swimming and BBQ-ing opportunities are few and far between on the site.
Good news, I am now officially wise and knowledgeable; I can probably put letters after my name. I even have an A4 piece of cream(ish) paper to prove so. On the 10th I took some holiday time off and toddled up to York again. Kitted out in a rather dashing grey gown and stylish hat, I trotted up on stage in front of many friends, acquaintances and course-mates who I'd never seen before to have my hand shaken with alarming vigor. The (thankfully quite brief) ceremony was followed swiftly by a party in the department and many, many attempts to take jumping-in-the-air photos. I ruined most of them. I fly like a caterpillar.
Monday morning, however, I was back at work looking up coffee machines and wondering if I can put one on my desk. Preferably with an IV drip directly into my artery. However I perked up when I got an email inviting me and the other summer students on a guided tour of Vulcan. Hoping to either meet a Roman deity or see a far distant planet with a striking resemblance to a 1970s film set, I wandered around the site til I found the starting point.
The CLF’s Vulcan Petawatt laser is one of the most powerful in the world and produces pulses of super intense light that are fired at tiny solid targets.
Vulcan, it turns out, is a massive laser. A really massive laser. Several rooms worth of really massive laser.
The Vulcan Petawatt laser is one of five laser systems within The Central Laser Facility, at the STFC's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. After the requisite physics explanations (which I bravely endeavored to follow) we all trouped around the systems, peering in through very thick coloured glass, and entered a massive lead-lined concrete bunker. This contained the chamber where the laser is used to make things explode. Which is pretty cool. The laser is used mostly for studying the behavior of plasma - the fourth state (after solid, liquid and gas) - but conversation soon turned to how effective the bunker would be as a last resort location in a zombie apocalypse. Vulcan and the other laser systems on site are used for a wide range of science, from studying organic samples to investigating nuclear fission.
I have now met quite a few summer and sandwich year students on the site, with lunchtimes now spent sitting in large circles under trees and contemplating forming a rounders team to take on the grad students. It is nice to spend time with other people younger than Microsoft, even if explaining my job and what I am doing on site is a wee bit embarrassing. It seems that "bio" degrees are really the bottom of the technology ladder.
people younger than Microsoft
That being said, I am pretty lucky. The people I am working with have the patience of saints. They happily explain what I am meant to be doing, and how to do it, without any jargon and are very forgiving when it takes me twenty minutes to find a room that is actually just down the corridor. I am now generally self-sufficient on some tasks (mainly printer repair and Windows 7 upgrades) and have got paperwork filing down pat. Over the next few weeks I'll hopefully get to see more of the site, including the Diamond Synchrotron, and actually figure out what one can do with cmd.exe.
Published on The Yorker
Published on The Yorker
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