Category: grad school

I have a cold. In fact, the cold, the one that’s been slowly burning its way through the geology department. It got Dave (my fellow TA) last week, and my advisor, and one of the nice ladies from the office. To put it lightly, I feel like poop on a stick.

I somehow survived the second field trip today. Don’t ask me how. I think it’s entirely up to the wonderfulness that is TA!Dave, who came along to help do the driving and ended up running most of the field trip. Which I guess works out, since he’s done the field trip many more times than me. Joe was along yesterday and basically ran everything then, too. I only had a little bit to add about sedimentary rocks at that stop, but in all honest, from the perspective of mineralogy, sedimentary rocks are pretty damn boring. Today Joe was off seeing if he could salvage anything from his house… hopefully it’s not as grim as it sounds, but it’s hard to feel hope on the subject of wild fires. We actually caught a glimpse of the burn damage on the drive. The ridge we passed by was black with a few skeletal trees still clinging to it. The entire area looked like a shadow with clear skies overhead.

I think I may just not go in tomorrow, since I’ve only got a BS class in the later afternoon. And I’ve already canceled my office hours.

The real question is… will I get any writing done when my brain has been replaced with snot?

Also, I want to write a ranty thing about The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo – the book version that is. As a sneak preview, the intended title of the post will be: “The Inescapable Gravity Well Surrounding Mikael Bomkvist’s Penis.” Or something along that vein.

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.

Well, school kind of started this week.

I say kind of, because classes don’t actually start until next week. But Wednesday was the grad student orientation, and now I’m in training to learn how to be a TA.

I feel rusty on the whole being a student thing after eight months off. I’m a little worried about my organizational skills having fallen apart. I went and bought my dayplanner for the semester, though I don’t really have anything to put in it yet. I’m taking three classes (technically four, but the last is a seminar that’s just an hour a week with no work outside of class); since my research project doesn’t really get started until next year, I’m trying to get as many classes as I can out of the way. So we’ll see how that goes.

What I’m more worried about is the two sections of Mineralogy Lab that I’m going to teach. I haven’t really taught before, and Mineralogy was not one of my best classes. It was also a class I took in my first undergrad semester at CU, so I’m pretty rusty on it to begin with. I’m supposed to meet with Joe and the other TA tomorrow, so hopefully that will help allay some of my worries.

It’s definitely going to be very different as a semester.

And while I got myself into a routine of posting every weekday recently, I don’t think I’ll be able to keep that up. Obviously, I haven’t managed anything since Tuesday. Oh well. Grad students don’t have free time, I’ve been told.

Yesterday was my last day at Noble, so for at least the time being I’m no longer a corporate stooge of Big Oil. As last days went, it was pretty tame; I finished cleaning my personal belongings out of my office, I turned in my badge, I shook hands with a lot of people. What struck me is how unaffected I was by all of it.

Admittedly, I haven’t had that much experience when it comes to leaving jobs. When I got laid off from AT&T, I ended up crying on my last day. I think that was partially because it was the only real job I’d ever had, and I was scared as all hell. When I got fired from NBM, there was more crying, but those were the sort of frustrated tears you tend to have when you’ve been screwed over by your boss completely out of the blue.

So I guess with those as my only experiences, I expected at least to get sniffly on my last day at Noble. And… nothing. It really just felt like any other day. Who knows, maybe in a week when it all hits home I’ll have a nice little cry because I miss my coworkers and my job.

But I kind of doubt it. I think, fair or not, I really said my goodbyes to the job back in February when I got accepted in to grad school. And even before that, I was slowly drifting away. There hasn’t been a whole lot of work for me to do since the economy took a dump, really. Budgets are tight, exploration is limited, and I think a lot of us were scrabbling for things that would just make us look busy. But that feeling of not being needed really hit home in January, when I had the opportunity to start working full time again and discovered that I just didn’t have enough work to justify charging forty hours on the clock.

So rather than that sharp, abrupt severance that I had with my former jobs, this feels like I’ve simply come unmoored and drifted slowly away. There are worse ways to part from a job, I think. I’ll miss my coworkers, but I certainly don’t miss crying over it.

And it also helps, I think, that I’ve got a three year adventure to look forward to.

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!

I took the bus up to Boulder this morning and turned in my signed acceptance letter, as well as the notarized faculty oath that I needed to take if I want to be a TA or RA. So, it’s official! The paperwork avalanche has been started.

I also talked to my boss yesterday and let him know what was going on. The good news is, I can keep working as long as I want, so I’m planning to stay until the beginning of August. I can’t really work past the start of school, though, not if I’m going to be working 20 hours a week for the university.

It’s a little scary, since I’ve been working here for four years now. They took me in when I was unemployed and had nothing better than a high school diploma to my name, and there are a lot of people in this company that I have to thank for the opportunity to get my Bachelor’s degree. I suppose the good news is, Mike will still be working here, so I can stop by and visit people.

More than anything, though, I’m excited. Graduate school! It’s going to be an adventure.

I got a “letter” (it was actually a pdf attached to an e-mail because this is the twenty first century, baby!) this morning from CU, and here’s the most important part:

During your graduate program, you will be under the supervision of Dr. Mary Kraus.

やった!!!!!!!

Also, this:

The Department of Geological Sciences has advanced your name to the Chancellor of the University as a candidate for the Chancellor’s Fellowship.

Plus a lot of other details that indicate this magical, magical thing: I’m going to have funding! So I can actually afford to go!

やった!!!!!!!大学合格！

Edit: And hilariously enough, I just got an acceptance letter from the School of Mines as well, in the actual hard copy mail. They are also not offering me wads of money to defray the cost of my tuition. Though even if they were, I wouldn’t pass up the opportunity to work for Mary for anything. Still, it’s a lovely ego boost.

My application for grad school at CU is now officially “in review,” which means it’s ready for the faculty to look at it. Keep your fingers crossed for me.