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It’s been 2 weeks since I made it back to Starkville from Dayton, OH. As much as I liked being in Dayton, it feels really good to be home. Living out of a hotel room is not my ideal living situation. I missed having a kitchen, having a shower with decent water pressure, and a lot of other little things. The worst part was not having a car because I didn’t have the freedom to move around like I normally do. On the bright side, not having a car did meant that I had to interact with the other interns outside of work more than I may have in the beginning, which turned out to be a good thing. The work that I did involved visualizing radar data using VTK and Paraview, both produced by a company called Kitware. They can be good tools to have on my belt if I decided to go into scientific visualization as a career. All in all, it was a good summer. The first five weeks were really hard on me, but things got much better after that. I’m glad to be back, and I’m ready for football season to start.

I think I’m actually going to try to make it to football games this year. I used to go to almost every home, but I’ve been going to fewer games each year. Last year, I only went to one game. Our record has been 8-27 over the past 3 years, so it’s been hard for me to motivate myself to lose 5-6 hours out of a day to go out and support a team that’s probably going to lose. I could watch on TV or listen on the radio and still get other stuff done.

Our new football coach Sylvester Croom, has caused a lot of excitement for our program. He’s the first black head coach in the history of the SEC. He was a running backs coach for the Green Bay Packers before he came to our school. Hopefully, he can turn the program around in a few years. I’m not too encouraged by the fact that after every practice, he talks about how many mistakes they are making and how much improving they need to do. At least they are improving. I saw on the news the other night that Coach Croom is implementing the West Coast Offense. I can’t wait to see that! It’ll be interesting to see something new on offense. I hope our new quaterback and our receivers are up for it.