For my practicum project I worked at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, located in Greenbelt Maryland. There I worked with a large team of contractors and civil servants in the Microwave Lab. I was very lucky in landing this internship at NASA, as a family friend of mine knew the site supervisor and told him that I was interested in volunteering for him and his project. The purpose of my internship was to assist the team in their production of the balloon borne instrument called PIPER. PIPER stands for Primordial Inflation Polarization Explorer. This instrument is being designed to fly high in the Earth’s atmosphere in order to detect radio waves from the Cosmic Microwave Background. This Background is basically a portrait of what the universe was like a short time after the Big Bang. Primordial Inflation refers to the inflationary epoch after the Big Bang, when the universe began expanding at an exponential rate. This period of time is when photons could first escape from the plasma that the early universe was made up of. It is these photons that we can detect and study in order to more fully understand how our universe was formed. On site I performed various tasks such as helping one of my site supervisors, Paul, thermo-cycle—which consists of dunking an object in super-fluid helium in order to check for leaks—an indium sealed quartz window. This window would allow the optics of PIPER to be able to detect these photons. The design for PIPER is such that an extremely large balloon would lift a dewar filled with a number of sensors and the optics, all submerged in super-fluid helium. The equipment must be submerged in this super-fluid helium in order to bring them down close enough to the temperature of the Cosmic Microwave Background, which has a blackbody spectrum with peak temperature of 2.7 Kelvin. I performed a number of other tasks, such as creating silicon molds for the thermistors that would later be needed as well as creating the metal thermal shields that served to keep outside radiation out of the dewar during thermocycling. Overall, I learned a great deal about the hands on and practical applications of science. It is good to learn how everything works and understand the laws and concepts, but nothing beats going out and putting all the laws, theories, and concepts to good use. I learned that you must be somewhat patient if you want to be an effective scientist, since not everything will go according to plan on the first try. Also, my site supervisor told me one day that Obsessive Compulsive Disorder for Scientists is really Obsessive Compulsive Order. It is good to be very particular, tedious, and careful when designing something that ultimately will cost millions of dollars to fly. There are also a number of things I learned that had nothing at all to do with science. First, I learned that the scientists at Goddard hail from all over the world and that many people students would do anything to have the opportunity that I had. I worked with some of the smartest people in the world, and got to see what goes on in their everyday lives. I made new friends in the various other interns who worked with me on PIPER. One girl came all the way up from Puerto Rico to work at Goddard, and I will be continuing to work with her over the summer. I can definitely see myself as a future employee at NASA, but I would definitely want to get my graduate degree first. I also, realize that Goddard is a HUGE place, there are lots of opportunities there. This is why I am excited to go back this summer and work on a completely new and different project!