VLP Week 9 (3/13/2026)

     Hello everyone, this is now week 9 of my internship with UCF’s Veterans Legacy Program, and we are already at spring break. I feel like I’ve said this a lot but I am nothing but astonished by how fast this year has been going by, I feel like midterms were yesterday but it’s been two weeks. But with all that aside I think it’s high time that I tell you all what I have been up to this past week.


To start things off, it’s been a while but at Tuesday’s meeting the team had finally heard back from VLM so we should hopefully be able to start uploading bios to the website soon, we were asked to modify the pdfs so that any personally identifiable information that isn’t from publicly available sources should be covered up. This is a new development and the team will discuss more about VLM after the break so I will update you all when I have more information


The next thing I will be talking about is the thing that I mentioned in last week’s post that I was most looking forward to, that being the meeting at the Texas Instruments lab. To catch you up if you need reminding, last week the team had a meeting at the lab to look into creating replicas of headstones of veterans in national cemeteries to be used in lesson plans so classes can do headstone rubbings without having to bring them to a cemetery. This week we had a follow up meeting at the lab to talk with some staff at the lab to further discuss options and materials that can be used and they showed some tests they had worked on. Some different techniques that were discussed included some samples of 3d printed items to see if that would work and they had printed 2 samples for us to see. The other technique they brought up and had done some tests on involved using molds alongside epoxy or some similar material, this would be nice as it would make the replica one singular piece whereas with 3d printing we would need to attach multiple pieces together as the lab doesn’t have a large enough printer to print a whole replica, however the staff at the lab mentioned they were still experimenting with how to more easily remove the epoxy from the mold. I personally liked the 3d printed samples, I was impressed with the texture and after the meeting the other VLP members and I did a test headstone rubbing with the samples and it did work. We will have another follow up with the lab after the break so I will be excited to talk about it then.


That’s all I have for this week, I hope you all have a great weekend and break and I’ll see you in 2 weeks.

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