 This summer, students from the Montgomery County Maryland School System spent a week learning what we do at the NRC. This is the second year we've hosted students for the A Week at the NRC program. Students earned this opportunity in one of three ways. By placing in the top three NRC award categories at the 2018 Montgomery County Science Fair, by participating in a 2018 summer high school internship at the NRC, or by receiving a recommendation from their STEM teachers. I did a science fair project and my science fair project was on the statistical analysis of outliers. So I studied different data sets and determined the outliers and determined how they're different from the rest of the population. And so the NRC, surprisingly, they came to my project and they want to know more about it. And so I qualified for their summer program. Well, student STEM programs like A Week at the NRC are, in my opinion, a win-win-win activity. It's a win for the students. They get to come in and see what we do here at the NRC, meet the staff, see scientists in their natural environment doing technical work. It's a win for the technical staff, both the organizers and also for the presenters who have to present to these high school students. These are really sharp high school students and they ask really hard questions and they're really inquisitive. And it's also a win for the NRC as a whole because the NRC is getting 11 or 12 ambassadors into the community of students who have seen what we do here, seen our commitment and our passion towards our mission and our technical work. During the week, the students heard presentations from experts on topics such as nuclear materials, basic reactor concepts, new and advanced reactors, the NRC inspection program, and emergency planning and incident response. Students met with judges Roy Hawkins and Paul Bolwork of the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board panel, the independent adjudicatory body of the NRC. And they heard from Nuclear Security and Incident Response staff on cybersecurity at nuclear facilities, which was a popular presentation with the students. My favorite segment of this week has been our cybersecurity presentation earlier today. It was really interesting to see how the NRC has responded to global cybersecurity issues and how they always get back on their feet regardless of what kinds of compromises happen around the world and how they're so quick to respond in these high technological activities. To keep the students engaged, we plan several hands-on activities. They spend some time at our Professional Development Center, learning about nuclear plant equipment and important nuclear concepts like the half-life of radioactive materials. And of course, the students got to dress out in radiation protection gear like an NRC inspector. Putting on the boots, putting on the gloves and putting on the hood and everything, it was just really fun and it was really interactive. And I think it was great to know what workers are doing every day, like they're dressing up in these uniforms and they're going out into the field, going into the reactors to inspect them. The students logged some time on the reactor simulator used by NRC human factors researchers. They experienced the complexities of operating a nuclear plant and how important the NRC's work is. They were even tested with some unusual circumstances that caused alarms to sound. To demonstrate what they were learning, the students chose NRC-related topics on which to focus and present on later in their week, such as the regulation of radioisotopes and the reactor oversight process. I did my project on the Three Mile Island crisis and how, 30 years later, how it changed the NRC, how the events, the lessons that the NRC learned during that crisis, how it changed the way regulation procedures happen now and how the improvements that the NRC has made based off of that crisis. After a graduation ceremony attended by NRC commissioners Stephen Burns and David Wright and other staff, the students spent their final day down the street from the NRC at the Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology. There they were treated to a tour of the NIST Museum and saw firsthand some research conducted using an NRC licensed research and test reactor. We hope the students had some fun and learned a lot while exploring the NRC. I think the ALEE program is important to the students because it gives the students an opportunity to understand what NRC's mission is, how we regulate. It also gives the students the confidence to interact with NRC subject matters experts and interact with their peers. And lastly, it gives them the opportunity to think about careers that they may not have thought of.