TL;DR Space + Travel = ☀️SUMMER🚀
What a dream summer!
It kicked off with a holiday to Italy where I saw the beautiful cities of Siena, Florence, Pisa and Luca with a friend from ISSYP 2019 and a new friend.
Returning to Oxford for the Trinity Commemoration Ball before making a quick stop in London before heading to Boston!
From Boston, I visited MIT and Harvard, enjoying what the city had to offer. Then New Haven, CT for a lunch with a fellow Assassin (OUFC).
Next stop, NYC.
Everything you could ever want is there, friends from everywhere. Overwhelming at times but energetically epic.
In DC, I extremely unfortunately missed the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum because it was closed for renovation but Capitol Hill with an Oxford friend is always lovely.
4th of July in OC, CA. Excellent stuff.
I love LA. It felt like home.
LA, the capital of both the aerospace and entertainment industries. Great weather and people. Go to Venice beach to have your eyes opened to super cool and interesting facets of life.
After a solid 3 weeks of travelling, I buckled down to start my internship at NASA JPL.
In the Materials Development & Manufacturing Technology Group (357H), I was a researcher in computational materials and physics informed machine learning with high performance computing for materials thermodynamic assessment in pycalphad with Dr. Richard Otis (technologist/creator of pycalphad). I was also a characterisation scientist studying interfacial features in joints between additive manufactured 6061 aluminium alloy and conventionally manufactured aluminum alloys as a feasibility test for potential application in spacecraft heat rejection systems (HRS) and deep learning for image segmentation of grain boundaries for magnetic shielding prediction in mu-metals with Samad Firdosy (materials engineer).
I even got to record a podcast episode with one of my mentors Dr. Scott Roberts!
To say it was a lifechanging summer is understating it. It truly changed the course of my life and was a source of incredible growth. I will look back on this summer grateful with the fondest memories.
Here are some photos from the summer. BONUS: I managed to get up to the Bay Area for a weekend.
Supported by the Newton-Ungku Omar Fund awarded by the Malaysian Industry-Government Group for High Technology (MIGHT).
