Getting Ready for Grad School

It’s only June, but I don’t think that it’s too early to get my first semester schedule put together. I like having things tied up, neat, and ready to go before I get there. So this morning I got up early and took the bus to Boulder to meet with my advisor.

The news is pretty exciting. The project that I was hoping to get on has now been promised funding! The only slightly less good news is that since it is a big, costly project, it’s going to take about a year before the funding appears. What this means practically for me is that I’ll end up needing to hang in for an extra semester or two, since bailing on a half-finished project would make it tough to produce a decent thesis. (Plus I wouldn’t want to leave something undone anyway.) As long as I’ve got the funding, however – and it sounds like I will – I think it actually works out fairly nicely. It means the first couple of semesters I can hit the course work really hard to get the bulk of that out of the way, so that when I do have data to dive in to and cores to examine (drool) over, I ought to be able to really concentrate on it. It also gives me a lot of time to trawl through the relevant literature and become really familiar with what’s already been done with the time period (the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum) and the general area.

After bouncing some e-mails around this afternoon, I’ve also managed to basically put my schedule together, and I doubt I’ll have to change it at all. I’ll be taking Sedimentary Petrology with a teacher I really like (woohoo!), and of course anything that involves thin sections makes me very, very happy. I enjoyed the heck out of igneous/metamorphic petrology last year, and I’m a soft rock gal through and through. I’ve also signed up for Applied Sequence Stratigraphy and Basin Analysis, which sounds generally relevant to the project, and just darn interesting. Stratigraphy, like thin sections, makes me very, very happy.

Also on the list is a required seminar that all new grad students have to take. It’s only an hour a week, and it sounds like it could be fun – sort of a “meet the faculty” mixed with a general literature review. Another fun thing is that I’ve gotten permission to sit in on the undergraduate paleobiology course. I didn’t have the chance to take it when I was an undergrad (I ended up doing geochemistry instead since it fit in my schedule better) and I think an introduction to paleontology is in order since I will likely be seeing fossils – the PETM is when a lot of the ancestors of modern mammals first appear. In a semester or two I’ll hopefully have a chance to take a vertebrate paleontology graduate class, so an introduction to the subject will be helpful, I think.

I’ve also found out what I’ll be teaching this fall – the mineralogy lab! It’s a little intimidating, since mineralogy was not my best subject and I really struggled with certain aspects of it. My advisor isn’t teaching this semester, though, and I really like the mineralogy professor, so I think it’ll work out nicely. I’ll just have to do some review to make sure I’m familiar with the material again. Apparently many of the labs for the geology department are in the process of being restructured to make them a bit more student-friendly, and mineralogy has already gotten the treatment. So the labs will be new to me as well. I’ll have two lab sections to call my own – there’s another TA to teach the other two, and he’s apparently done it before so hopefully he won’t mind giving me the occasional push in the right direction.

The classes look fun, I’m more excited than scared about trying my hand at teaching, and I’ve got a cool project to look forward to. It’s still two and a half months away, and I can’t wait!