First day at the Kapteyn institute

On the first day of my international internship I woke up at 8 o’clock to prepare to go to the RUG. I packed everything I would need, like the mathematics textbooks as we would transfer some of the examples into the Python programming language and the notebook in which I will be explaining to first year students how Python works. I was brought to the RUG by car and I arrived at about 9:30. As I had to be there at 10 I explored the campus first.
After having explored the Campus I went to the office of mister Vogelaar and arrived there at about 10 o’clock. We started with a short introduction on what I will be doing this week. This was often interrupted by employees that needed a computer as they had just arrived at the RUG from a foreign country as it was the beginning of a new semester. It was a busy day for the people at the RUG especially for the people of automation who needed to provide and install computers and add new user accounts to the database of the intranet of the Kapteyn institute.
After the short introduction we had to create a user account for me too. The computer I had to work on was fortunately already installed. After having created the user account I had to explore the distro of the Linux operating system that I had to use at the university. This is namely Scientific Linux. After this it was about 11 o’clock and we went to have some coffee. There I met some colleagues of mister Vogelaar who were also working at the same department.
After coffee went returned to the office and mister Vogelaar gave me some information about what the position of the Kapteyn institute is at the RUG. After this short conversation he explained me in a little bit more detail what the end product of the internship would be and what kind of things had to be in the notebook. After that is was lunchtime and we went to the canteen for lunch. During lunch I had a very interesting conversation about black holes and quantum mechanics from which I really gained new knowledge. I also asked him what astronomy at the RUG would involve and especially whether or not it involved programming. He said that it did include programming and that in the first year of astronomy you can decide what branch of astronomy you would like to do as it is a broad study with a lot of fields of discipline. This information really gave me a new view on a possible study to follow after secondary school.
After lunch we returned to work and I started to learn the basics of Python and I made great progress in this. This would actually be the task for tomorrow but as I already had a lot of basic knowledge about other programming languages and as I am a fast learner we already started with it today. After having learned the basics of Python we started with the notebook. I thought it would be a nice idea to transfer the ABC-formula into Python and we executed the idea just after having explored all the different programs I could use to write and test Python. These are programs like the Kate text editor combined with the terminal and Anaconda continuum which has a built in console to test the code. This way you don’t have to switch from the text editor to the terminal to execute the code. I also got a little tutorial on the website to create the notebook on. For the text in between the code I will have to use markdown (the easiest programming language in the world!) extended with HTML.
After this it was 4 o’clock and we went for another cup of coffee. During this I had a conversation with mister Vogelaar about the demand of professional programmers in the world today and JavaScript that is becoming increasingly more important in the world of informatics as more and more applications are now ran online. After this very long conversation it was nearly five o’clock and time to go home. It was a very long, busy and productive day in which I learned a lot. I’ve also already reached some of my personal EIO goals. These are orientation on the field of discipline informatics and seeing people from different cultural backgrounds working together at a university. The last goal may not have been reached completely today but I am sure it will be reached in the next couple of days.
For now I might teach myself some more Python and I hope that tomorrow will an equally productive day.