It isn't every day you get to lunch with a NASA scientist.

So you may have noticed a decrease in blog posts about interns compared to last year. This isn't an indication of my level of involvement with the interns, but rather of the smoothness of operation this year. For one, as I mentioned before we have done away with the Intern Challenges - although they were fun, they took a lot of work to develop and execute, and we got mixed reactions in the evaluations at the end of last summer. This is a bit of a bummer, though, because I had fun connecting with the interns in a different way, and I know some of this year's interns who read last year's blogs have been asking whether we would be doing any this summer :-(. Also, some things that were experiments previously are simply part of the routine this year - first day scavenger hunts were fun as always, we'll be having another Bring your Friend to Work Day (this Friday.... unfortunately I will be on vacation for it), weekly cookouts are a breeze, and we will once again feature dinner and a visit to Mees Observatory for a field trip this year. On top of all that, we have got a really great group this year that is exceptionally well behaved and mature (maybe that has something to do with the new ground rules and handbook?), so there is very little drama to report or anything for us to have to worry about or adjust. Wow, summertime and the living is easy!

For all that is old hat, there were additional new things brainstormed at the intern mini-retreat besides the handbooks and newly established milestones. One of these was to offer some professional development during lunch, particularly lunch discussions with imaging scientists who work in the field (especially since some lunchtime professional development outside of ImSci is already offered via the Summer Movie Series). Well, today we tried our first one - and with an alumnus, no less!

David Bretz is an MS Imaging Science alum who works at NASA's Johnson Space Center (how cool is that?!) and happened to be visiting campus recently. I was introduced to him because he is one of our alum, but I realized during our chat that he would be a perfect speaker for our new professional development lunch idea. Dave graciously accepted my invitation, but was going to be heading back to Texas soon, so we decided to do a Skype session. Bob coordinated the timing, technology, and free pizza, and voila! Our first professional development lunch was a go.

Dave briefly discussed the various research projects he's been a part of, including using images of the space shuttle to assess damage inflicted by space debris. He kept his talk short and sweet so that most of the time could be devoted to questions and answers - and although the interns were a little shy at first, after getting a few questions in they really opened up and started asking a lot of really great questions. Almost all of the interns had at least one inquiry, and as a result they got some great insight into college, careers, and even the relevance of their current projects. Overall, the whole event went fantastically!

Keep an eye on the interns' blogs to see what kind of impact today's session had. I am really proud to have contributed to the creation of this experience for them!