Still Summer?

T-minus one month until I leave for Costa Rica! Just yesterday I had a Spanish Skype Interview with Veritas University (the university I will be attending) in order to find the level of Spanish I should be placed in. The interview went quite well! Better than I was expecting anyway… I spoke for thirteen minutes straight in Spanish. I was pretty nervous beforehand, just hoping that I would understand half of what she was asking me. I ended up really enjoying the conversation and having to speak in Spanish! That bodes well for the semester ahead of me! I can’t wait to become more conversational in Spanish!

Jeremiah is down to only three weeks left in his internship! But as of August 20^th, he is also now in school full time (A senior! Where did the time go?). That means he is very busy fitting in 40 hours of work, 15 credits of school, and homework. But he is managing, taking it day by day and still very much enjoying his internship. Proud of how hard he is working, and amazed at how he manages it all! 

While Jeremiah slaves away, I feel guilty that I have quite a bit of free time before I leave for my study abroad! I am definitely enjoying the free time and trying to treasure it before I no longer have any summer to enjoy! So yes, it is still summer for me! I have been keeping busy with a few different activities… Babysitting, crafting, working, and reading to name a few things. Wicked is coming to Gammage, the theater that I work at, and it is here for six weeks! So starting tonight through the time that I leave for Costa Rica I will work/see Wicked 20 times!! It’s a good thing I enjoy the show, but I’m not sure how much I’ll like it after the 10^th time! Also I just started up an online business class called Essentials of Selling. I have decided I would like to pursue a minor in Business, so this will get me three credits closer and so far I am enjoying the class!

Here are some of the crafts that I have been working on!

A tic-tac-toe board for a game area at my friend Heather's wedding.

Decorating mugs- always wanted to try it!

Stenciled a map of Europe on this box for a place to store all of the ticket stubs I collected in Europe! Then drew the map of our route.

 All of the paper/stubs from our trip!

Books I’ve read this summer that I highly recommend: Columbine by Dave Cullen, Seductive Poison by Deborah Layton, The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, Sarah’s Key by Tatiana de Rosnay, Paper Towns by John Green. These are just some of the books I’ve read this summer. I love having the time to read as much as I want when I’m not in school!

By the way I have phrased the beginning of this post it would sound like Jeremiah and I never see each other! While the next three to four weeks will probably be that way, we made our last few weeks of summer some to remember! I’ll show in pictures what we’ve done.

Jeremiah and I attended Heather and Kohl's wedding! Heather pole vaulted with me in high school and was/is one of my very good friends!

The usual silly pictures with these kiddos!

Family homemade pizza night!

A beautiful AZ sunset (same night as the pizza night)

We moved in Jeremiah's brother, Nathan, into his dorm at ASU's Polytechnic campus! While we were helping him move in, I was mistaken as a CA twice! I guess I have a certain look about me??

Nathan's very ASU-spirited room!

Many nights spent just hanging out with family. 

 Spontaneous trip Salt River tubing. Picture taken using my GoPro camera. 

Jeremiah and I have a new obsession with "Cookie Butter." Tried it in Europe and found it here at home... This stuff is dangerous! 

Played at church last weekend and had an amazing time! Love making music to worship God! With Jeremiah there too, it's even better!

LSP Welcome Back Picnic- some of my best friends from the organization!

My whole 2013 cohort!

Had Me a Blast

Woah, what is this beneath my finger tips? H- h- ... hard keys?? After five straight posts composed from my iPad along European train tracks, I must admit it feels strange to be writing with a physical keyboard again. But that, needless to say, is probably my smallest lifestyle change since coming back to the good old U S of A.

I'll get right to it:  my internship with Medtronic. I've been working there for almost six weeks now, which means I'm already halfway done! I remember thinking in April of my Disney internship last year that a twelve-week internship would feel very short, and now that I'm experiencing a twelve-week internship, that notion is even more cemented in my mind.

It's been a great first half, though. I was brought on as a mechanical engineering intern into Medtronic's Product Analysis Lab, where they perform failure analysis on the hybrids that either didn't pass testing or failed in the field. (Hybrids are circuit boards, and Medtronic Tempe Campus manufactures the hybrids that go into all their pacemakers and other cardiovascular devices.) It's a really neat place to work because the lab has some seriously high-tech equipment that they use for their failure analysis:  scanning electron microscopes, x-ray machines, plasma etchers, vapor deposition machines... You get the idea. I'm surrounded by equipment that costs more money than I'm likely to make in a lifetime.

In terms of why I like my internship, though, the equipment is just the superficial tip of the iceberg. First of all, I'm learning a TON. Probably because I'm working in a lab of almost exclusively electrical engineers and chemists. Oh yeah, and there's one geologist. But no mechanical engineers! Consequently, I've been building lots of great cross-disciplinary knowledge, in addition to skills that will serve me well even in a mechanical engineering career.

So what exactly have I been doing? Well, to put it one way, I'm the PAL's wire bond fairy - I'm here to make all their wire bonding troubles go away. Wire bonding is a way of electrically connecting integrated circuits (ICs) to the substrates they're mounted to. Normally it's easy to do, but when the PAL gets failed products, they have to use some very destructive techniques to extract the ICs, and these techniques tend to make the ICs very hard to wire bond. I'm working on developing new means of extracting the ICs in order to curtail the gray hair syndrome that appears to be spreading through the department as a result of wire bonding. It's slow going, but my mentor says I've been doing well, so I guess I'll take his word for it!

Most of all, though, I like my internship because of the company itself. All companies have mission statements, but in most cases, it seems like the missions are just words on paper, meant to improve the company's credibility. But at Medtronic, I feel like the mission is something I see employees consistently living out in their work. It's something that guides business decisions and inspires people to strive for continuous improvement. It's easier to get up for work each morning knowing I'm helping "alleviate pain, restore health, and extend life." And beyond that, the company seems genuinely focused on my own development as an engineer. The internship feels like a two-way street.

Sorry, that was pretty much a whole essay on my internship. In fact, that was probably enough words for an entire blog post... So I think I'll tell the rest of the story of the past few weeks primarily through pictures!

MY Fourth of July, spent on "A" Mountain with Nathan and Kevin. It's no lake house, but it was a good time!

Dbacks game with Nathan and Dad

Laser tag at Main Event with the interns (14 of us in total). We also went tubing down the Salt River last weekend! It's been lots of fun getting to know everyone. They're a great group of people.

Themed going-away party for two of our best friends, Kyle and Stephanie. Wishing them luck as they begin a new chapter of their lives in Wichita, Kansas! We're gonna miss them here in Arizona.

Date night at The Cheesecake Factory to reward ourselves for 1 week of no processed sugar + 1 week of no saturated fat. It was a long 14 days. But this made it all worth it!

Movie date with my two favorite gals. We saw Inside Out and loved it! Yet another creative and entertaining Disney Pixar film.

Other miscellaneous shenanigans with the Warren/Lucas babies. Life is rough ;)

Alright, Hannah, ball's in your court - which musical are you gonna quote next?