Saturday, July 13, 2013

The Roots of Passion



Today was the Penn Summer Discovery’s trip to Washington D.C. where we visited the Smithsonian Museums and Georgetown University.  It was an amazing day, by far my favorite day of the entire program.  We got to go to the Air and Space Museum as well as the Museum of American History before visiting Georgetown University.  Unfortunately we only had a few hours to visit the Smithsonian, which is nowhere near enough time to see everything that the Smithsonian has to offer.  I could have spent the entire day in just the Air and Space Museum alone.  Instead of staying near the museums for the majority of the day, we went to Georgetown where there wasn't too much to do other than go shopping.   I would have liked it much more if we could have gone to Georgetown first and then went to the Smithsonian for the rest of the day instead. 

My absolute favorite part of the day was the Air and Space Museum.  It was full of jets, planes, rockets, and telescopes that dated from the 1950’s to today.  During our time there we went to an astronomy exhibit, a navigational exhibit and an entire room dedicated to the space shuttle Discovery.  It was the best moment in the world to be surrounded with all the knowledge and more importantly the aircraft.  I love flying and aircraft technology with a passion and made sure to investigate some of the jets planes more carefully than everyone else.  Being a pilot is my number two dream career next to physics; fortunately physics and aeronautics are closely related, so the skills from physics can transfer over to being a pilot.


I can say that I truly love flying because when we walked into the museum I was instantly mesmerized and filled with joy at the sight of all the planes and rockets.  If I could have, I would have spent the entire day in that one museum and still wouldn't want to go at the end of the day.  If I ever go back to Washington, I will make sure to visit the Space museum again.  The museum was a really good reminder of why I love science and why I came on this trip in the first place.  There could not be a better way to get me back into the game of science than a trip to a space museum.  Now I feel like I can’t wait to get back in the lab on Monday to return to the science that I love.   

The other museum that we visited was the Museum of American History.  This was still a very interesting museum with an endless amount of fascinating things like cannons, important documents, and artifacts.  I especially liked the World War II exhibit and the cold war exhibit.  Both of them had an infinite amount of period artifacts and materials.  It was a fun experience going through an American history museum after taking AP U. S. History in school and being able to instantly recognize almost everything in the exhibit.  With that said, there were still plenty of cool new things that I have never seen before like Abraham Lincolns hat that he was wearing when he was                              assassinated.  I’ll have to plan on going back to this museum when I get a chance as well.

There isn't much that I can say about Georgetown University other than the fact that it looked similar to most other schools that we have seen so far.  I found out that the university is a great school for studying history and archaeology but other than that, I don’t really know what Georgetown has to offer.  After walking around campus for a while we went into town to eat lunch and experience the Washington culture.  I found out that there really isn't much difference between people in Philadelphia and people in Washington.  When we were all done for the day, we headed back to Philadelphia; however it ended up being a three hour bus ride due to intense traffic.  It’s good to be back in Philadelphia and hopefully tomorrow will be just as good as today. 

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