For my Junior internship, I will spend a month working at General Atomics under the employment of Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. My mentor is Mr. Alex Nagy, the lead engineer for the DIII-D project, an experimental fusion reactor. I will be working with him and another intern from SDSU to help in the design of an injector for lithium granules. Because of my limited experience (read: total lack of experience) with nuclear physics, I will most likely help in this project by doing CAD work. However, I'm sure I'll have the opportunity to learn some of the physics behind the reactor's operation. Furthermore, I'll be able to work on a sort of engineering project that I haven't before: engineering in a vacuum system, which will be an excellent opportunity for me to gain expertise in engineering principles previously unknown to me. The only thing I'm nervous about is the way in which I might make myself most useful, since my relative lack of expertise compared to Mr. Nagy and his other intern, a senior majoring in Mechanical Engineering, might render me unable to make myself as useful as I'd like. I'm really hoping to be able to contribute in some valuable way and not just be a drain on General Atomics' resources and Mr. Nagy's attention. We'll see what happens in that regard, but either way, this is a very unique opportunity, and I intend to take full advantage of it.
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