This week I arrived in Bozeman for the summer REU project. It is a lovely city with a population of about 40,000. The town has a strong local economy and culture, including restaurants, boutiques, coffee and tea shops, stores, fitness centers, and many others. There is plenty to do downtown and near MSU's campus, but a short drive provides ample hiking opportunites and immersion in nature. Various branches in Astronomy, but Solar Physics in particular, use a computer language known as Interactive Data Language (IDL). It does not seem to be a particularly user friendly language for those of us who have only worked with a couple languages, but the extensive libraries it offers are incentives to not switch to Python. Before the REU began, we were given a pre-arrival assignment to write a program that produces and graphs the first five Legendre Polynomials via GDL, a free online alternative to IDL. Once we arrived, the first week was dedicated to daily IDL tutorials given by graduate student Chris Lowder. On the first day we completed the necessary setup to allow for our use of the network(Helios). During the rest of these sessions we repeated many commands to learn the syntax of the language. By the end of the week, we could navigate our way through the terminal, write basic codes, and begin preparing for our actual projects. The first week was also dedicated to gaining a baseline knowledge of the Sun. This was accomplished via many lectures, personal meetings with advisors, and a seminar. These included: "Observing the Sun," by Dr. David McKenzie, "Formation and eruption of an AR sigmoid FR: NLFFF extrapolation and MHD simulation," by Dr. Chaowei Jiang, "Solar Cycle," by Dr. Andres Munoz-Jaramillo, and "Sun as a star," by Dr. Dana Longcope. I had daily meetings with Dr. David McKenzie to discuss specific IDL commands that are pertinent to my project, magnetic reconnection, solar flares, solar prominences, turbulence, vorticity, enstrophy, tortuosity, and many other concepts. We also discussed the contents of Berger's papers. Aside from the academic aspect of this REU, the 6 participants planned outings almost every night of the week. Some of these activities included attending a mixer and Dr. Longcope's house for the Solar Physics department, playing trivia at a local pub, exploring the farmers' market, participating in Art Walk downtown, and hiking to the M at the top of the mountain overlooking Bozeman.