Week 8: A Minor Setback

Hi, everyone!

Unfortunately, this week did not start well. I sprained my shoulder climbing on Saturday, which greatly decreased my right arm’s range of motion. Also, it hurt to raise my arm to type for a few days, so I am a little behind on my writing. It isn’t too bad, and I can do most things left-handed, but it was definitely a setback in my progress. Now, I’m trying to catch up on writing the background section of my paper, as well as doing what I had initially planned on this week–the literature review section.

As for my internship, I brushed up on my Fortran coding knowledge. I finally found a compiler that worked on my computer–I had almost given up on this, but I tried again, read all the small print instructions, and finally got it. I also successfully installed gnuplot (a graphing interface I can call from Terminal; I included a screenshot of the results from one of my heat-conduction codes from earlier). gnuplot can do a lot more than just the points and lines; like my knowledge of ParaView, I can only scratch the surface of what gnuplot can do, but it is a powerful tool regardless.

My mentor asked me to learn Fortran before beginning my internship, and I did, but I didn’t practice it enough, and I’d forgotten a lot (on top of only knowing the basics to begin with). I did my coding in Python instead, because it made more sense to me. But now I’m practicing other languages more (C, C++, and Fortran) because my mentor is on a trip in Europe, so I’m working from home, doing things I can learn myself, but I ask him questions whenever I have them. Having a foundation in more languages will help me later, and they are fun to learn, so it is a good way to spend my time while my mentor is away.

See you next week,
Daria