Strides in research

Research is moving. In December of last year (a whopping five months ago!) my adviser and I planned to submit a paper. Well, we just submitted it last Monday. Finally. After working on the darn thing for a year and a half! Now it's out of my life for at least a couple of months. Good riddance.

On a related note, I recently received a request to review a manuscript for the journal to which I submitted my paper. I didn't realize that they would ask a grad student to review a paper before she even has a publication through the peer-review process. This will be new. Luckily I have an adviser to shadow me so I do it right.

I gave my first conference talk in January. I uploaded it two hours before my presentation time and didn't practice at all. Though my talk was the last one of the session, I entered the room at the beginning of the session. I watched as the seats slowly filled and people gathered along the walls throughout the session. The talk before mine must be really interesting!

As the applause faded and I heard my name spoken into the microphone, few people left. They came for my talk? I hoped for a clear mind and calm nerves. My talk came out reasonably cogent and perfect length. My adviser was relieved, as was I. No one asked a question, though the person running the session tracked me down later and said he enjoyed my talk and that I was doing important work. Neat! I survived my first conference talk, and perhaps made waves in the process.

I hope to continue that smidgen of momentum. My PhD research direction changed a bit, much to my satisfaction. I'll still work with the WRF model, but the standard version instead of a special climate version. It is much easier to get my hands on and has better support. The results should be relevant to many mountainous areas around the tropics, which makes me feel like the research is more worth doing.

That's not all, folks. I'm trying to schedule my prelim (again) while I try to help a visiting undergrad (I'm learning alongside him), work with a geology student on a side project, and now review a paper. Do you know how difficult it is to get four scientists to agree on a two-hour block of time to meet? If one's not in DC, another is in Fiji. Or maybe India.

My adviser wants me to finish by December 2012. I have a start on some of the background work, but I'm still having trouble running the model. I haven't decided yet if that's a delusion. How long should the research and writing portion of a PhD take? Eh, I'll give it a shot anyhow. I certainly don't want to be the perpetual grad student.

Which brings me to my future after grad school. I have not yet decide how or when to integrate communication and education into my degree, though I it is important that I get that experience before I graduate. I don't know what kind of position I'll look for. Scientist, programmer, communications... who knows. If J-man and I stay together in Grad School Town, it depends on what's available in the area. Post all that under future work.

Next time: personal progress, and there is plenty to be had ;)

Busy, busy!

Making fun

It's official: I'm staying in grad school at least one more semester. I'm submitting a paper with my adviser early next week, then submitting my fellowship renewal. If next semester goes well, I'll just finish grad school. If it doesn't... well, I'll have to face that later. I'll assume for now that it will go well. At least I've learned about academic bureaucracy through this whole process.

In order to do what I can to have a productive semester, I intend to make it fun. I will make fun in my research life, my non-research academic life, and my personal life.

Research is still a question mark. I need to do something related to my proposal, but it does not have to follow it to the letter. In my last post I mentioned that education and outreach may be a good supplement to keep me interested in my research. I don't know how to do that specifically, but I will definitely think about it over the holiday break. Any ideas from the peanut gallery? If I make research fun, I will have no problem completing my PhD.

I'm registered fifth-semester German and third-semester Spanish. I miss languages, so it'll be nice to work with them again. I'm not too concerned about the classes' difficulty because I catch on to languages pretty quickly. I'm also taking a hydrology class. Hydrology will be a new subject for me. I hope it will give me a better sense of nature as a system. Most of my classes only touch on the atmosphere's relationship to the rest of the Earth system.

Making my personal life fun is (for once) the easy part. Jujitsu, biking, cooking, friends... easy :).

Settling back in

Due to scheduling issues, my prelim will not happen this semester. My school-related goals now include finishing the interminable paper and completing enough of my PhD research to give a talk at AMS in January. And catching up with class.

My house is getting messier, but I spent most of the day cooking so it's okay for now. I made a beef roast, chicken soup, salmon, and cookies. I have more cookies planned so I can use some nifty little fall cookie cutters I bought while I was in Wisconsin.

Personally, I'm doing okay. I'm still low on patience. I've run my patience to the brink of losing it over the past five months. (I wasn't very involved in the first few months of my dad's treatment, so it wasn't as difficult then.) I think I'm just emotionally burnt out. And tired. And still stressed, in good and bad ways. I don't know how to recover from this besides wait and hope it doesn't take too long.

In other news, change is in the air. I'm not ready to release my ideas to the world until I'm more sure of them, but they are big. I'll let you know when they're ready.

Upcoming return to pseudo-normal

I will return to school at the end of this weekend. I will have to make up for three missed weeks of classes and research.

I still plan to complete my prelim this semester. Excuse after excuse has delayed it for a year. No matter how valid they've all been, I'm tired of putting it off. I want it done so it doesn't hang over my head anymore and so I won't have to take more classes. I also learned yesterday that I am scheduled to give an oral presentation at the AMS Annual Meeting in January. On top of those, I need to renew my fellowship at the end of the calendar year.

Lucky for me, all of these goals are related to the same work: my PhD research. If I make good progress on that, all of these should be within reach. For the prelim, I add a proposal and oral defense. For the meeting presentation, I put together a short talk. Last, and probably least demanding, I write a progress summary to renew my fellowship. Sounds like a tall order, but those are my specialty.

That leaves writing and class out of the mix. I don't know what my new class deadlines will be, but they should be flexible since my adviser teaches the class. I don't know about writing. I really want to continue with everything I planned before. I think I'll try to and hope for the best.

Four days and I return to my life. It will be much the same as before, and yet forever different. More different than I have ever experienced. I never imagined life without my dad find me this soon.

Whether or not he is here, I will continue to make him proud of me. I am thankful for the time we had together and all he taught me.

Intentionally over-committing

Have you ever intentionally taken on a little more than you think you can handle? If you have, why?

I'm doing it this semester because I don't want to give my mind time to wander. My dad is not doing well. I don't want to publicize the details, so you'll have to believe me. The doctors either cannot or will not tell us what his current group of diagnoses mean in terms of prognosis except to say, several times, that it's not good. I don't want time to consider possible implications of his current health beyond an initial thought. Oddly, this situation seems to help me concentrate on work most of the time. I'm making progress on most fronts.

In pursuit of the goal to keep myself busy, here are my major work-related activities this semester:

1. Prelim: The proposal write-up is due November 23, and the oral presentation is tentatively schedule for December 9. That leaves me a little over two months to write it. My to-do list says "come up with plan for prelim."
2. Research for AMS 2011 in January: I don't know if I have a poster or oral presentation yet, but it doesn't matter. I need results to present either way. The first step is downloading data. Thankfully I wasn't optimistic enough to believe I could have model results in time.
3. @#$% MS paper: Yep, still going. The Energizer paper. At least I'm working on a first round of revisions to most of the text. Computers still are not cooperating to finish the final two figures.
4. Copyediting for the school newspaper: This only consumes three hours one night a week. It'll give me a taste of what working on a tight deadline is like without too much time commitment.
5. Writing for the school STEM magazine: Only one issue will be published this semester, so I will write one article for print, one article for the web, and two blog posts. It should be straightforward and relatively quick since the articles are supposed to be short. It'll challenge me more to choose a topic than to write the articles.
6. Intern as a science writer with the university news bureau: I'm excited about this. My mentor actually gets paid to write about science! And she's professional about it! How refreshing. The internship can take as much or as little time as I let it because I accept (or turn down) assignments as they crop up. Finally, some reliable mentoring in writing.

The work for my only class should pull double-duty with my PhD research, so I don't count it as a major commitment.

I also intend to help my family as possible and as needed, attend all the jujitsu practices I can, and occasionally go rock climbing, ice skating, and biking. Oh, and cook tasty food. I have to eat, right?

If you think I'm crazy, you're not alone. I think my mom is the only person who doesn't question me anymore. She's learned that many of my seemingly crazy ideas are some of the ones that work out the best.

Whirlwind to whirlwind

My brother's wedding was not perfect but it was close. We only had a few minor problems that were easily remedied. Music and toasts were good and dinner was excellent. My mom and I hosted the gift opening yesterday morning (with a lot of prep help from family). Everyone liked the food there, too. My family likes food.

I enjoyed the whirlwind wedding weekend. I'm also glad it's over. My abstract for the 2011 AMS Annual Meeting is due today and I'm still short on sleep. Today I'm free to rest, bike, and work. Tomorrow and Wednesday I'll take my dad for treatment. Wednesday evening I will return to Grad School Town for a few meetings and to prepare for my Great East Coast Tour.

I haven't told you much about that yet, have I? It involves six cities over fifteen days: Knoxville, TN; Charlotte, NC; Hampton, VA; Alexandria, VA; Adelphi, MD; and New York City.

Family and friends keep asking why I decided to take this trip. It started when I realized that Knoxville, where I'm attending a professional workshop, is halfway to the East Coast. I may as well drive the other half to visit my friend in Adelphi. And since I'm in Adelphi, I should visit my friends a few hours away in Hampton. Then my brother's mother-in-law invited me to visit her in Charlotte. I couldn't pass that up. After all that, I thought about the one friend on the coast that wasn't part of my travel plans. Why wasn't he included? No reason, so I decided to drive to NYC to visit him, too. I convinced my Adelphi friend to meet me in Hampton and accompany me to NYC. Yay, more friend time!

I'll miss the first week of classes, but that's not a big deal. I'm taking my adviser's class. He'll be gone for most of the first week, and when he returns he'll cover some computing basics that I already know.

Of course my road bike will come with me. I plan to ride the Apple Cider Century in southwest Michigan on September 26, so I need to incorporate training rides into my travel. Between the Tour and the Century, my jujitsu dojo is attending a big workshop in Ohio the second weekend of September. Stories will surely ensue. I'm excited on all counts!

I hope I'm still alive at the end of it. I need to do some serious work this fall. I will also try to work on my handy dandy laptop during my travels. Will I ever leave work at home when I take a vacation? I cannot escape this love-hate relationship with technology.