Yesterday marked my last day as a practicum student with NRCan even if my work had already been finished. Yesterday the co-op students from the Unversity of Waterloo and myself gave presentations of our projects in front of the scientists from Anderson rd and CHIS's director David Mccormack. The presentation itself was an interesting experience. I only learned that I was supposed to give the presentation a week before and from the way it was described to me I thought it would be a much shorter and more informal presentation, updating my coworkers as to what I had been working on the past few months. While it turns out I was supposed to give a longer more technical presentation, I didn't have an issue doing this as I was very familiar with the ins and outs of my project. Despite David saying that I did well on my presentation, he didn't like that I had been instructed to make the the map using vector data while the NOAA had used raster data. At the end of the day my projec...
My Experience as a practicum student working with Natural Resources Canada's Space Weather Forecasting team The Canadian Hazards Information Service (CHIS) and more specifically the Space Weather Forecasting team was not at all what I was expecting going into this work term. They are a small (~20 people) closely knit group of scientists . For the most part work hours are somewhat informal with people showing up between 8:00am at 10:00am and staying until 4:00pm to 6:00pm. I based my work schedule around my supervisor, Dr. David Boteler, who worked 9:00am-5:00pm most days. My daily schedule looked something like the following. The first thing that I would do when I came into work would be fulling up my water, and grabbing a cup of coffee. I would then go to my work station and check all my emails from the last few days, and then start working on whatever the task was for the day. I ate lunch much later than the other employees because I started my second job after leaving ...