I was very excited about making a personal website circa GSA/AGU, but then life seemed to happen in the interim. But I’ll list a run-down of the most exciting events to have happened this semester:
January 18: My advisor had a baby! Which meant that…
January 23: I gave my first Geomorphology lecture to a class of real live students! Better yet, the topic of the lecture was the different dating techniques (thermochron, cosmos) which meant I definitely had to go back and read over some things. But it ended up going quite well.
February 1: This was the due date of my first progress report as a grad student, which also meant I assembled my Master’s committee. Really started to feel like the real deal here!
March 17-18: Grad Colloquium! I was on the planning committee, and I’d have to say it went pretty well. I heard some great talks by my fellow students with yummy free snacks throughout the day. We ended with the Entropy Pep Rally, where I ate some really good chili.
March 26: Raced in my first downriver race in a whitewater kayak, and I plan on not making it my last!
Circa mid-April: Gave myself a lil’ pat on the back as I managed to replicate the frost-cracking figures from Anderson (1998), Hales and Roering (2007) and Anderson et al. (2013). I had been staring at those papers for some time, but once I learned the basics of modeling 1-D heat diffusion profiles in my Math Modeling class, I went to town with my own research. This is very much one of my prouder moments as a grad student so far after riding the Struggle Bus through my first semester differential equations class.
April 29: Entropy! The moment I’d been waiting for since I was a prospective. I submitted two short films which apparently went over rather well. I also misidentified a photo of a Brunton as a waffle iron.
May 2-4: The Shale Hills CZO hosted Xavier Comas (Florida Atlantic University) and Greg Mount (Indiana University of Pennsylvania) to complete a ground-penetrating radar campaign. We clocked in upwards of 6 km of survey by my count of the Garner Run subcatchment targeting hydrologic and colluvial features. It was my first time working with GPR, and I have to say it was a really enjoyable and valuable experience. We all deserved beers after dragging equipment over the craggy boulder fields!
May 8th: I was awarded the Marie Morisawa Award by the Quaternary Geology and Geomorphology Division of the Geological Society of America for my proposal, “A periglacial erosion record in a headwater valley, central Pennsylvania.” I’m so honored to receive such an awesome award (with awesome previous winners!) and the funds will go toward running some cosmos samples!
May 8-14: I attended (most of) the Field Stratigraphy course taught by Mark Patskowsky and Liz Hajek out in the Guadalupe Mountains, TX and NM. Confession: this was my first true field-based sedimentology class, and what a place to learn! We had to skip the Reef Trail and McKittrick Canyon due to some forest fires, though. 🙁
May 16-17: The Shale Hills CZO All-Hands meeting, with guest star Jordan Hayes (Dickinson). Perhaps I’ll remember to report on this once it’s through!
