Two weeks of Cfao Maui Akamai Internship
Just finished up my first 40 hour week of work ever. To describe it in two words: “Office Space”. Not to say the Center for Adaptive Optics Akamai Internship is not a good opportunity, because it’s great. The National Science Foundation hooks a number of students up for a summer on Maui! The program started two weeks ago with a one week long short course in general optics concepts. The course strayed greatly from the typical facts and formulas in the usual engineering courses, but did include several fun activities and a spiffy tour of the observatories on Haleakala.
The best tour was the AMOS, a 75-ton 3.67m telescope run by the Air Force — the largest in the Department of Defense. Politics and whatever kind of defense activity they use the observatory aside, the technology in the building and telescope is impressive. The building walls drop down to expose the telescope unlike the typical dome design. The design allows for high speed tracking and minimal temperature and aerodynamic turbulence. It rotates at an incredible 18 deg/sec, spins up and down at 5 deg/sec and can go from closed up to fully running in 8 minutes.
All of us interns in the program were hosted at the Maui Beach Hotel in Kahului for the first week. Free hotel, free room, an easy class and $500 for the first week. It also was an amazing chance to meet the rest of the intern group such that one doesn’t feel alone if new to Maui.
Another perk is our condo in Kihei paid for by the internship. Three people in a two bedroom isn’t ideal, but since they pay $2500/mo for it, no complaints here. Inter-island flights and 37 cents per mile for those with cars is paid. The pay is a $3000 stipend for the 8 weeks. Not too competitive when compared to many mainland internships unless you look at the whole package, or if you consider it’s on Maui. Location alone is enough for me to think this is better than anywhere except, maybe, say NASA? If you do know of better undergrad engineering type internships in HI please tell me.
Back to the work week though. I say it’s like Office Space because it is. A meeting was held on tuesday on TPS reports. Okay, it wasn’t TPS reports, but a 2 hour presentation on peer reviews may as well been TPS reports. It’s also funny how these things come from some corporate management on the mainland headquarters and no one seems to give a rip. Then there are the characters in the room. The guy giving the presentation reminded me of Tom Smykowski. Then there’s the slightly hyper crazy guy falling asleep and later reading newspaper at the dismay of the presenter. Then there’s the token asian dudes in the back. It’s just like the movies.
Not to tease or criticize as I’ve met many genuinely nice and knowledgeable people, but these things stick out at me since I’ve never been in a real office space before. One more thing that’s great is the often awkward silence at lunch when a bunch of engineers get together. It’s priceless, but of-course nothing new — I’ve become used to that at an engineering school.
All in all, I’m not making any judgments on the workplace yet, just observations. Next week my supervisor will be back from vacation and supposedly will load me up with some sort of project which hopefully will be more exciting. For now work has just been searching the net and tinkering with some open source software.