Nicole’s Ecuador Trip, Birthday, and Endless Internship ✈️🎂

It’s that time of week again! Welcome back to The Guitarrón Chronicles, hosted by your guitarrónes Danielle and Hannah! This week we’ll get to hear from Nicole, our fellow guitarist (and soon to be vihuela-ist???)!

⋆⭒˚.⋆ Nicole’s Summer Update 7-14-25 ⋆⭒˚.⋆

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a.. No yeah, it’s a plane.

At the beginning of the summer my family and I took our annual trip to Ecuador to visit family. This year we took time to sightsee in a place called Mashpi, a cloud forest reserve in the north western part of the mountain range. At an altitude ranging from 1640 to 4000 feet above sea level, various species of flora and fauna can be found there and nowhere else in the world. We had the opportunity to see the Agouti, Tayra, and various frog and hummingbird species. The rest of the trip was restful, seeing family and taking light hikes throughout the ranges.

Helicopter, Helicopter

This year marks my third, and final, year with Bell Textron, a company well known for the Huey (UH-1Y), the Osprey (V-22), and the most recent model, the as of now unnamed MV-75 (FLRAA). I work in the Chemical Process and Engineering Laboratory, where I have the privilege of managing a few 3-month projects, from the creation of the test plan all the way to the finalized report distribution. My projects range from chemical process control, process optimization, data collection and reporting, and method validation. This being my third year with the company and in the same group, I have had the pleasure of seeing the testing, reports, and document revisions I have made in previous years be utilized and integrated into daily lab life. Unfortunately this is my last year of internship with Bell, as my academic interests lead me away from the manufacturing sector into a more experimental and research oriented Chemical Engineering drive.

Birth.

I, in fact, have literally just turned 20 last week. Yikes. It doesn’t feel any different, my knees are still intact, and I haven’t gotten any urges to start any odd hobbies so.. I’m safe.. For now.

The rest of it.

When I am not swamped at my 6:30-4, I can be found in the gym at 5:30am, running (and hating it), biking (and loving it), climbing, or paddleboarding away from my problems (boredom). I have also squeezed one trip in during prime internship time, where I swung down to Houston to visit friends on the Fourth of July. The girls trip made it out of the groupchat, call that a miracle. The rest of my summer will be much of the same, until the week before school, where I, like my classmates, will be frantically trying to fit my life back into a car.

Terribly sorry if my writing style is… something, I write how I talk…

Auf wiedersehen,

Nicole Guarderas