Joey Hart is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Mathematics, North Carolina State University I had a very interesting, and on some levels unique, internship experience in the Optimization and Uncertainty Quantification Department at Sandia National Laboratories. The origins of my internship came several months before through collaborations with my eventual mentor on another project Bart van Bloemen Waanders. During the 2016-2017 academic year, I was a graduate research fellow in the SAMSI (Statistics and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute) program on optimization. Through this fellowship I began collaborations with several applied mathematicians and computational scientists. Our work led to Bart inviting me to apply for an internship under him in the upcoming summer of 2017, thus the story begins.