Transition

I'm currently sitting in a hotel room with Steve, Mike, and Scott, somewhere in the border between Nevada and Utah. Regulation keeps us from driving more than ten hours or 550 miles a day, otherwise I'm sure we'd be in Green River by now. I'm really excited to get there and see what the community is like, and it'll be nice to start working again.

The past week we'd been on base for transition, preparing our debriefing for our last project and briefing for this project, along with miscellaneous meetings and projects. It was really weird to be back on base around all the other Blue and Green unit teams (all of Gold and most of Silver are still somewhere in the Gulf Coast). I frequently still hung out with Blue 3, but also had ample opportunity to wander off and reconnect with people that I hadn't seen since training, which was nice. In some ways it made me really appreciate my team, but I've also been wondering what life would be like if even one of us was replaced by someone else. It's interesting to think that replacing even one of us would completely change our team dynamics. While back at base we spent one day working for the Sacramento food bank (I don't remember the exact name), and sorted over 2400 apples and oranges, not including the bin full of rotten ones we had to throw out. Aside from that we didn't do much aside from meetings while on base.

However, I did get a really exciting offer for life after Americorps. I've been in contact with researchers at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory about collaborating on prosthetics research once I get into grad school. They mentioned that they're planning some very exciting research soon, and that they'd like to have an engineering at University of Rochester working with the lab that generates most of their primate data. Based on that, I'm probably going to discount Purdue and UPitt from my list of schools, since they were ranked equally with U of R before and U of R has a pretty much guaranteed research opportunity waiting for me. I'm going to visit them the end of this month, and I'll be able to say more about the position after I get a chance to talk with the researchers there.

In retrospect, I do really miss working in Los Angeles, even though I wasn't a huge fan of the city. I really grew fond of the students I worked with there, and even though I know that another team is going to be replacing us at Dorsey I still worry about how they're doing without us there. I'm not sure how I feel about meeting a whole new group of kids in Green River, knowing that I'm going to be leaving them in two months as well. However, this group should be about a polar opposite of who we were working with before, so it should still be interesting. Also, it sounds like our site coordinator is very big on using individual talents, so I might be able to put some of my more practical engineering skills to use. Green River is apparently best known for its melon crops, so I'm thinking I'd like to try and obtain the supplies to teach the kids how to assemble a melon launching catapult. Model rockets and egg protecting devices might be fun activities too. Mike keeps making jokes about how bad of an idea all this stuff is, but hey, engineering should be fun, shouldn't it? I can't wait to see what it's like out there.

As a final note, the snow and cold, crisp, clean air are very refreshing out here. I was starting to miss having real seasons.