Monday morning. I dragged myself out of bed at 8.30am, by 9pm I was at the Space Telescope Science Institute where I start work. It was only 5 minutes walk away from my apartment, but I managed to be the last to arrive at the orientation. Orientation mostly involved us filling in forms of various kinds, including two extremely scary forms for our income tax exemptions. It was so intimidating that none of us foreign students have submitted ours yet.

After that, we were brought around the institute building. It's a fairly new building, since the institute was only set up less than 15 years ago to operate the Hubble Space Telescope. The building is within the John Hopkins University campus, and it's surrounded by trees, so at times it seems as if the building is within a forest. There is a room with several computers which is for the use of us summer students, which means that we get to work pretty independently, without anyone breathing down our throats.

I had a working lunch with my mentor, Dr. Margaret Meixner, who is a middle aged, motherly looking woman. We talked about her work and the sort of project that I could choose to undertake. Of course, relevant to this was my own level of knowledge and skills..."Do you know Fortran?" "No", "Do you know how to use Unix?" "No", "Have you done ANY programming before?" "Ummm...just a little bit once". After some discussion it was decided that I should work on a project to create a theoretical model on how dust around a young star behaves (a lot of her work seems to involve dust of some kind or other). To start off, I need to learn Unix and learn up some stuff from a textbook she handed me to photocopy, and report back to her in two days. I'm going to be working on my own a lot, in fact...she will be gone for a total of 4 weeks during my duration here (not all at once though), so I will really have to learn how to work independently.

So, having thought myself freed from studying after finishing my exams 2 weeks ago, off I went to the intern office to try and learn how to use Unix, and cram up about 70 pages of a textbook. So far, that's what I've been doing mostly...what seems clear is that my colleagues, the other interns, seem to have dived right into their work, with reams of data displayed on their screens, while I am staring blankly at the workstation trying to figure out how to open a program within Unix. At other times, I'm sitting there with the photocopies of the textbook, trying to force myself to absorb the stuff. Somehow it's hard to focus, without something concrete to do. In addition, the other guys seem to be pretty well schooled in astronomy, whereas I have done nothing more than elementary astronomy in my university studies.

In any case, tommorow I will be meeting up with Dr. Meixner, and we'll see where we go from there.