While in Israel, Melanie became addicted to a local snack "Bamba"
Melanie Olaes (San Diego State University)
When Melanie joined the GROWTH internship program she was a 4th year student at San Diego State University. Her major was in Astronomy and she was also completing minors in Mathematics and Computer Science. Melanie will join the Master's program at SDSU in the fall of 2016 to continue her graduate studies in the field of astronomy. Her dreams of becoming a professional astronomer.
- Internship Start Date 24 June 2016
- Internship End Date 20 August 2016
- Project Exploring a novel discovery technique
- Mentor Dr. Eran Ofek
- Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel & Caltech, USA
Learning MATLAB was an interesting hurdle. MATLAB isn't a common language in the astronomy world, but the application of it had become more clear to me.
Adjusting to the local culture and overcoming the language barrier was stressful at first,
but now I am incredibly enjoying myself.
-- Week 1
Research has been great this week. I finally feel settled into Matlab conceptually and becoming more comfortable with the task at hand.
I took a trip to Jerusalem and it was absolutely beautiful.
-- Week 2
This week I attended the iPTF Summer School! Being surrounded by a group of like-minded peers was incredible. I was able to stay in a
motivated state and get new ideas for astronomy projects both internal and external to my GROWTH Internship.
-- Week 4
This week I was able to attend and present at the GROWTH conference. I was able to find more resources applicable to my project by
meeting other team members.
-- Week 5
I am now simultaneously working with a Python and Matlab versions of our image subtraction code. Because I have little image
reduction experience, this gives me the opportunity to learn steps in-depth.
-- Week 7
