Apparently I am too bold.

My blog is not a technical report. Nor is it a well-structured professional opinion source. I deliberately disregard SEO techniques and try not to care whether anyone is actually reading it. My blog is meant for me, and it's only public because I'm curious about your comments to my thoughts, if you care to share. This blog is full of sarcastic computer art, song lyrics, and the rantings of a 20-year-old girl from a very small place.

I never really let anyone make me feel bad about that until Friday.

Because someone I respect an awful lot took the outpourings of my frustration as if a few paragraphs can encompass the whole of my experience (though, to be fair, I gave no indication that there were good aspects to it), and then told me that NASA would never hire someone who writes such things. And I was so arrogant as to say "And I wouldn't consider submitting a resume." That was probably a mistake, but it was probably also my disbelief talking, my disbelief that anyone would blow something so out of proportion.

What I was trying to say, is--There are some things going on that I'm not comfortable with, so... here's the big rant. Unfortunately I have a tendancy toward dramatic turns of phrase (a side effect, I think, of the fact that the very first thing I wanted to be "when I grew up" was a novelist), and I'm sure that just compounded any hard feelings the rants inspired. I didn't mean anything too personal about any of the people I seemed to put in the line of fire, and I didn't mean to speak about NASA as a whole. I realize that I had a fairly unique experience among the interns. I restrict the scope of my comments to a general impression of the Marshall Space Flight Center. I don't like the attitude of the place, and I won't apologize for that.

But I am sorry that I didn't consider the offensive and disrespectful implications of such a one-sided rant. There was plenty to take from my experience. I learned a lot about image processing, which is a branch of my field that my school doesn't really touch. Looking at it that way, I'm actually really grateful for the opportunity. I learned a lot about how NASA projects are developed. And on Friday I learned a lot about how to identify things that I could have done differently.

I feel like I made a contribution to space exploration. Maybe. Every line of code I thrashed felt painful at the time, because thrashing is downright unscientific. Wikipedia calls it Cowboy coding. Fighting the feeling that I was asked to do it the wrong way (yes even after reassurances that this is how science research works) was a huge source of my frustration, and it rather gave me tunnel vision to the whole experience. So... Only now that I can step back and look at the whole summer, I can say I made a contribution. And I can dig that. But it wasn't to my own field. I repacked a few elementary things that have been done before, in a way that will help out space exploration. That's awesome for NASA and its goals, and in the end I'm pretty pleased I could be a part of it. But other than possibly creating a software library that other code monkeys can use in very specific projects, there was no deliverable or discovery that advanced the field of computer science. Any reasonably bright programmer could have stepped into my position this summer. And the opinion around there that the terms "computer science" and "programming" are interchangeable, is exactly why I didn't submit my resume to their file. So maybe it wasn't just disbelief talking…

Anyway. As far as accomplishments go, I wouldn't label this a failure by any means, but I do feel I could have done better elsewhere. The rants, and most of the troubles they indicated, are non-issues at this point, as far as I'm concerned.

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PS I made it home just fine. 14 hours between Huntsville and Vermillion. A night of rest. And now I'll finish unpacking.