At the start of this week, I met with the graduate student I’ve been working alongside, Romanos. Romanos had been so incredibly helpful, walking me through more complicated steps in the code and answering my barrages of questions with so much patience and enthusiasm. Now that I have a good sense for how the code works and how the packages work together, I’ve begun working on the tasks that have been assigned to me. I started with some of the easier tasks, such as renaming the intermediate files that are generated as the program runs and shifting some repeated code to be a macro. I’m a bit surprised by how much I’ve already learned and how quickly I’ve been able to contribute to the project, even if it is minor – I was bracing for a much longer on-boarding experience, but I’m really glad I’m able to be productive so soon into this summer. Some other things I changed included fixing a persistent warning, expediting the startup process, and starting on some of the class documentation. Beyond work, I’ve been getting to know the area a bit better, but the temperature and humidity are a bit higher than I’m used to.