I’ve now officially survived my second week of grad school. Well, technically yesterday was the official survival date, but I was in Colorado Springs for most of the day. And then when I got home, I decided that a round of Plants v. Zombies was more interesting than writing anything. I think Popcap has figured out a way to inject heroin directly into the eyeballs of anyone who plays its games, through the internet.
So after two weeks of grad school, how do I feel?
My panic has converted to stress, so that’s good. Maybe.
This week I taught my first two labs. There wasn’t really a whole lot of teaching involved this time, since it was mostly just going through the syllabus, then turning the students loose on an array of minerals so they could test the physical properties. I’m going to try to be incredibly nice about grading this one, I think; some physical properties can be pretty subjective (luster, for example) and I remember how much I loathed the physical properties lab as an undergrad because of it.
I’m also finding it interesting how a class as a hole can have a certain attitude with it. One of my lab sections was much more sociable than the other. One of them buckled down and got through all of the work a lot quicker, and there seemed to be a lot less questions. I’ll be interested to see how things change once all of the students get to know each other better and hopefully become less shy.
Next week I’m going to have to start attending Mineralogy lectures regularly, I think. That’s when lectures about the things I don’t remember and was never that good at (eg: point groups) start up. It’ll help me survive teaching lab, but I’m not all that thrilled about having three hours a week less to work with.
And time is the big, big thing. The last two weeks, there’s been a couple of days each week where I haven’t even left school until about 1900, because I’ve been in the library trying to pull articles. I’m hoping that will calm down soon, once I’ve got at least a decent library for the Bighorn Basin established. That time may ultimately be spent with thin sections instead, though, since I feel like my free time during the day (and when the petrology lab is free) is pretty limited.
I’m trying not to make myself crazy about Bighorn Basin, though. I had a good chat with my adviser on Friday about that. My big problem is that I want to feel like I’m doing something toward the project. And right now, I’ve got to face the reality that for the time being, all I can really do is read. A lot. And then some more. The Bighorn Basin is an area that’s already had a lot of study, so I need a thorough understanding of what everyone else has done before I can really get to any questions that haven’t already been answered. For me, that feels pretty frustrating, since reading doesn’t really feel like work. But I just need to calm down, and do it, and not let my impatience get the better of me.
Maybe that’s my first big lesson.
My classes are going all right. I dropped down to two, since the Surface Process Modeling class didn’t sound entirely relevant, and two classes is already a pretty damn scary load. Which is another thing that takes getting used to. As an undergrad, I felt like I was seriously slacking if I wasn’t taking at least four, if not five classes. Not so, here.
I’ve also been joking that in just two weeks of school, I’m already dumber. What I really mean is that I already feel like I know even less than I did before – college has always had that effect on me. The more classes I go to, the less I feel like I actually know.
Case in point would be the lab exercise we did for sequence stratigraphy on Friday. The professor gave us a log section to correlate. This is something I thought that I could do in my sleep, because I’ve been correlating logs for the last four years. So I went on my merry way, and royally screwed it up.
Most of the fields I’ve worked with span two, maybe three sections, which makes them three miles “long” at most. And because of the very small area a field covers, I tend to make a couple little assumptions – (1) the formations of interest should be present throughout the field, and (2) they should all be about the same thickness, unless you have a good reason to think you’re working with something like channel sands. These little assumptions tend to be useful because sometimes you get logs that aren’t of the best quality, and also mean that if you can’t hunt down your formation (or something that just might be your formation if you turn your head and squint because Jesus, what were the loggers on?) then there’s something pretty interesting going on.
This mindset basically made me mis-correlate a big part of the section on Friday. Because I wanted the various formations to be continuous, and about the same thickness. Which might work in a field, but not in a region, where pinch-outs and facies changes are the rule rather than the exception.
Scale. It’s all about scale.
See, that’s what I mean – I’ve only been in grad school for two weeks, and I already feel dumber.