Friday

The CUWiP conference was kicked off with an exciting start which included tours of Argonne, Fermilab, and the Museum of Science and Industry. Sadie represented Augsburg on the tour of Fermilab where she learned all about neutrinos and the Tevatron. Emma, Sam, Krista, and I went to Argonne and went on six mini tours: TCS, ATLAS, Nuclear Reactors, Argonne Wakefield Accelerator, APS, and transportation. Unfortunately, the national lab tours were full and Jillian and Kayla were not able to attend. However, they decided to seize the day and had a wonderful time exploring the Museum of Science and Industry. See previous posts for more information and pictures about the tours.

In the summer of 2012, I had an internship at Argonne working on the NOvA neutrino project. I chose to go back because I wanted to learn more about other research projects at the lab and because I miss working there. While working there I loved attending all of the interesting seminars, interacting with all of the researchers, and exploring the campus. Argonne is a very large lab, so large it has its own post office, fire department, and zip code. During our tours we had to take a bus to get from place to place and in the warmer months there are bikes available for researchers to use to travel around the campus. It has research projects in all different disciplines from high energy physics to biology. 

A few of the places we toured I had already seen, some had new aspects that were not there two years ago, and some were completely new. My favorite tour was of the Argonne Wakefield Accelerator because the concepts were really well explained, it was very hands on, and I had never seen it before. The Wakefield Accelerator is unlike any other accelerators at Argonne because it was built to test the accelerator design instead of being built as a tool used to research. I also liked it because in order to get there we had to drive by the building I worked in!

--Elianna Bier