NESF 2023, Maryland, & Youth Camp

 NESF 2023

July hits and everything gets crazy busy. July 17-21 my parents and I got to go to Maryland since Logos' ExMASS team won first place, and I was mentoring and helping that team (I had done it the previous year and was not allowed to fully participate in it again, so I mentored the new team instead). For those of you who don't know what ExMASS is I may make a post about it, and my full experience with it but if not then here's the website. Anyways, we won and so the team got a full expenses paid trip to Maryland to go to the NESF conference and present our research. I did not get funded by NASA, but Logos said they would pay for half of  the team depending on funding, but they ended up just paying for me fully since the rest of the team got paid for. NESF was SO MUCH FUN! Getting to present our research was so exciting, and meeting all of the super smart people there too. Also, I was not expecting this but everyone was so nice. They were all genuinely interested in what you had to say and weren't hyper-critical or trying to tear apart your research. It was overall a great experience. Plus we got to meet Alex (our mentor scientist) in person for the first time, and he offered me an internship at NASA! Getting to see Asa (our resident 7th grader) get up in front of people and speak about a very advanced research topic was awesome as well. He carries himself surprisingly well for how young he was. Also, Brian Day gave us access to a pre-release version of their Moon Diff software that he wanted us to beta-test to find bugs before they launch it. He also got us into contact with Emily Law and her AI division, which is the project we're currently working on this year.

Maryland 2023

I just talked about NESF, but we also did a bunch of stuff in the Maryland area that week. Our rental car was a Tesla, so kicking off the week by driving from the airport to the hotel in a Tesla was pretty sweet. We got to say hi to some family who lives out there, and look around Baltimore a little bit while we were at it. Also, we got to eat lots of good food. Not only in the hotel, but in Baltimore as well. Plus (my personal favorite outside of NESF) we got to back to the Udvar F. Hazy center, which is the large campus of the Smithsonian Air and Space museum. I say "go back to" because we were in D.C. for spring break and we went there, but you could spend days there and not see it all so I really wanted to go back. Finally, we got to see Oppenheimer in an IMAX theater since we don't have those around our area. Overall, it was an amazing trip and probably one of, if not my most favorite for the entire summer. 

 Youth Camp   

After getting back from Maryland I immediately had to hop into my math class. I had to get ahead for our trip to Mexico in two weeks as well. That weekend in between Maryland and Mexico I had my church's Youth Camp. It was great, I had an amazing time it was just unfortunate timing due to how busy July was already. We got to do a ropes course, with a zip-line. We also got to go rafting, and sleep in a tent in the great outdoors. Our youth leader had never been rafting so we made sure to push him in a few times. It really was a fun time with some good friends, even if the timing wasn't the most ideal.