To say the least I've been absolutely swamped with school and research. I figured it has been a month since my last post so I'm going to go ahead and write a new blog post for all three of you who actually read it. I send this blog out to all the potential graduate students who either have already been accepted or who are deciding if they should take the leap.
To anyone who is thinking about graduate school, do NOT take on the option lightly. Ask yourself 1) are you ready for a commitment that borders along the lines of marriage? 2) Are you willing to spare a decent amount time from your personal life? 3) Do you have the patience to feel completely stupid almost every single day you come in to work because to put it lightly, sometimes, you JUST DON'T GET IT! If you've answered "yes" to any of these questions then welcome to club as soon as you've found an advisor to take you on. You will become innundated with due dates and writing. You're desk will become your second home. Your advisor, well, they're your new best friend/butt-kicker *wink to my own advisor* Once you're in, he/she becomes your second brain; your go-to person.
First off, the decision to take on graduate school is something I'm still coping with. I know my advisor could be reading this now so I'll go ahead and elaborate by saying I made the right decision. I'm in the office everyday between 8:30am and 4:00pm. I have both research and school to think about and I have many deadlines for both. I have been an undergrad for the past 4 years of my life so switching to a more graduate level time management system has been difficult and I'm still working on it. But knowing this, I say that nothing comes before your research. I repeat, nothing comes before your research! I've learned this the hard way. Deadlines and tasks for school are deadlines and tasks, deadlines and tasks for your research are critical. My work is at a site that recently has become very unreliable (and dry). I must be flexible. I should be thinking about my next task months before I actually perform it, but also I need to be able to perform it on the fly. I must be ready to go on a days notice. This is commitment. This is my job. It's super fun, but it's still a job.
We as graduate students have to make certain sacrifices for our job. Quitting your old part-time job that got you through undergraduate school, taking time out of playing your PS3 and discontinuing those long nights with your friends. Preparations for sampling must now be made, abstracts and proposals must now be written; lab meetings to attend, guest speaker talks to attend. Your day may end at the office around 4 or 5pm, but remember that you also have school and that's something that you normally don't finish before your day at the lab/office is over. So you now have to come home and complete it there. Welcome to graduate school life.
Sometimes you don't get it. Sometimes you go through the motions to complete your research tasks but what does it all mean? Sometimes you don't get it. Sometimes you feel 100% retarded and think to yourself, how am I ever going to explain this to someone else when I don't even completely understand it? Well, you're not alone. Stupidity is key to good research. It makes you think about what your don't know or understand and then forces you to look for the answers. Whether that means looking through journal article after journal article or sucking it up and confessing to your advisor that you just don't understand. Realize that it comes with learning. Your advisor is there to help and also if you're not quite sure you want to ask your advisor first, then hit up any post-doc that may be working in your lab. They can be a big help sometimes. There's nothing wrong with your feelings. Just make sure you don't completely rely on everyone else to help you find the answer. I, myself, am working on just that as we speak because when you figure it out on your own, it means sooooo much more!
So, I hope this has helped, even a little, with your decision about graduate school. If you've already made it in to a grad school, congrats, but also be aware that this applies to you as well. No one is safe from the wrath of new beginnings and a more difficult future. It's a beautiful thing to think about when someone believes in you as much as you beleive in yourself and they take you on as a graduate student. It's borderline magical, because it makes you believe that your 4 years of undergrad amounted to something.
An update on my site:
Dry! I've been trying to get out to my site for the past 2 weeks but the water has been so low that not even an airboat can access it. I'm trying to collect sediment for my mesocosm experiment that I'll get to in next weeks blog.
Monday, March 23, 2009
Monday, February 9, 2009
And I think to myself, "What a wonderful world."
It's quite a few months since we last chatted hasn't it? What would you say...5 months? So, I guess this means I have to catch everyone up. Let's start with the bad news; the main reason I haven't posted; the Storm. I capitalize the "S" in storm because indeed it was a BIG storm; not by windspeed, but by sheer size. At one point in it's existence it covered almost the entire Gulf of Mexico. Ike hit Galveston on September 13, 2008 as a category 2 but had the storm surge of a category 4. Several people lost their lives and economically, the island lost billions. In all, it claimed many dozen lives as it winded its way from Texas all the way up to Ohio.
Yours truely got out of the way. I had samples on me that took somewhere around 2 weeks to collect and I for sure wasn't about to lose them to this monster. So like the Beverly Hillbillies, I packed up my bags/samples and moved. I went north, though, not west. My first stop, the parents house in Montgomery. They had a large freezer, so I was certain my samples would be safe there. At around 3am on the 13th of February 2008, the power goes out. GREAT! Around 10am in the morning I'm searching for a place to go. I remembered that one of my colleagues was working in College Station, TX and potentially had some extra freezer space.
*Ring, ring*
- "Carolyn? Hey it's Mike! So listen, the power's out where I am right now. How is College Station doing?"
- "The power is still on here."
- "I have my samples with me and they need to stay frozen. Do you have any extra freezer space I could borrow."
- "Sure there is space."
- "Great! See you in an hour!"
*click*
The conversation was not verbatim; hardly even paraphrased, but made the point: I needed space and she had some to spare.
I ended up remaining in College Station for the semester where I continued to process the sampling I collected back in August. Basically, what I was doing was picking through all the sediment, grass, algae, and detritus and counting all the animals (vert or invert) that I found in each replicate. I also took observational notes on the % grass, % algae, and % detritus in each replicate. These measurements were subjective, but basically they allowed me to compare % type of vegetation with animal abundance. What I found was pretty interesting. Animal abundance, although not significant at the 95% level, showed a positive linear relationship with % grass. Animal abundance also showed (this time significant at the %95 level) a negative linear relationship with % algae. In June I will be more precise in my sampling among each restoration habitat.
Within the three restoration methods, I will sample spots within that contain mainly algae and spots that contain mainly grass. So instead of just three replicated from areas 1a/b through 4a/b (24 replicates total). I could possibly take 3 grass replicates and three algae replicates in each of the areas 1-4 a/b (48 replicates total). I would do this once in June and then again in January or February. This will allow me to collect samples in the middle of two different seasons, summer and winter. Hopefully, by then, I will be able to see if there is some truth behind the previous regressions I found. Until that time I am helping other collegues with their sampling as well as developing some other aspects of my own research.
Right now, I am in the middle of performing monthly diversity surveys with Chuan-Kai (CK for short), which include recording species present on designated mounds as well as perform hit count measurements using a 2m skinny wooden dowel rod and using a 10cm x 20cm quadrat to collect plant samples for species identification, height measurements, and chlorophyll analysis back at the lab. The areas are designated d1through d8 (slightly different than the designations I use for my study). It works well. Each area has 10 mounds randomly selected and flags are used to tag each individual mound. So for instance, mound 7 in area 3 will be marked with a flag "d3-7" so we can find them easier at a later date. CK and I are also preparing an area about 15 minutes north of Galveston Island for mesocosm experiments. What I will potentially do is use these enormous tanks to run controlled experiments testing plant/algal growth with sediment agitation and nutrient input. So, to put it in lay terms (taken from Dr. Armitage), the next question is why? Is there something different about the soil source, like the amount of nutrients it releases? Is there something different about the consolidation (i.e., less consolidated sediments are less suitable to rooted SAVs)? A great way to answer these questions would be to do mesocosm studies, where you would put in clumps of algae and/or grasses into tanks with different soils in them and look at growth and nutrient uptake. Likewise, you can take a bunch of the same soil and have some treatments with settled soil and some with suspended, unconsolidated soil and look and grass and/or algal growth and nutrient uptake. More to follow shortly on this subject.
So after an unorthodox semester in College Station, I am back in Galveston. I remember why I left College Station in the first place, and being able to return to the Island certainly filled a void within myself. There's nothing greater than being on an Island: the salty air, the persistant seabreeze, the plethora of natural beauty. To me there is no comparison. Islands, in my book, are places that make everything better. Since being back on this island, things have been better and I think to myself, "What a wonderful world."
Yours truely got out of the way. I had samples on me that took somewhere around 2 weeks to collect and I for sure wasn't about to lose them to this monster. So like the Beverly Hillbillies, I packed up my bags/samples and moved. I went north, though, not west. My first stop, the parents house in Montgomery. They had a large freezer, so I was certain my samples would be safe there. At around 3am on the 13th of February 2008, the power goes out. GREAT! Around 10am in the morning I'm searching for a place to go. I remembered that one of my colleagues was working in College Station, TX and potentially had some extra freezer space.
*Ring, ring*
- "Carolyn? Hey it's Mike! So listen, the power's out where I am right now. How is College Station doing?"
- "The power is still on here."
- "I have my samples with me and they need to stay frozen. Do you have any extra freezer space I could borrow."
- "Sure there is space."
- "Great! See you in an hour!"
*click*
The conversation was not verbatim; hardly even paraphrased, but made the point: I needed space and she had some to spare.
I ended up remaining in College Station for the semester where I continued to process the sampling I collected back in August. Basically, what I was doing was picking through all the sediment, grass, algae, and detritus and counting all the animals (vert or invert) that I found in each replicate. I also took observational notes on the % grass, % algae, and % detritus in each replicate. These measurements were subjective, but basically they allowed me to compare % type of vegetation with animal abundance. What I found was pretty interesting. Animal abundance, although not significant at the 95% level, showed a positive linear relationship with % grass. Animal abundance also showed (this time significant at the %95 level) a negative linear relationship with % algae. In June I will be more precise in my sampling among each restoration habitat.
Within the three restoration methods, I will sample spots within that contain mainly algae and spots that contain mainly grass. So instead of just three replicated from areas 1a/b through 4a/b (24 replicates total). I could possibly take 3 grass replicates and three algae replicates in each of the areas 1-4 a/b (48 replicates total). I would do this once in June and then again in January or February. This will allow me to collect samples in the middle of two different seasons, summer and winter. Hopefully, by then, I will be able to see if there is some truth behind the previous regressions I found. Until that time I am helping other collegues with their sampling as well as developing some other aspects of my own research.
Right now, I am in the middle of performing monthly diversity surveys with Chuan-Kai (CK for short), which include recording species present on designated mounds as well as perform hit count measurements using a 2m skinny wooden dowel rod and using a 10cm x 20cm quadrat to collect plant samples for species identification, height measurements, and chlorophyll analysis back at the lab. The areas are designated d1through d8 (slightly different than the designations I use for my study). It works well. Each area has 10 mounds randomly selected and flags are used to tag each individual mound. So for instance, mound 7 in area 3 will be marked with a flag "d3-7" so we can find them easier at a later date. CK and I are also preparing an area about 15 minutes north of Galveston Island for mesocosm experiments. What I will potentially do is use these enormous tanks to run controlled experiments testing plant/algal growth with sediment agitation and nutrient input. So, to put it in lay terms (taken from Dr. Armitage), the next question is why? Is there something different about the soil source, like the amount of nutrients it releases? Is there something different about the consolidation (i.e., less consolidated sediments are less suitable to rooted SAVs)? A great way to answer these questions would be to do mesocosm studies, where you would put in clumps of algae and/or grasses into tanks with different soils in them and look at growth and nutrient uptake. Likewise, you can take a bunch of the same soil and have some treatments with settled soil and some with suspended, unconsolidated soil and look and grass and/or algal growth and nutrient uptake. More to follow shortly on this subject.
So after an unorthodox semester in College Station, I am back in Galveston. I remember why I left College Station in the first place, and being able to return to the Island certainly filled a void within myself. There's nothing greater than being on an Island: the salty air, the persistant seabreeze, the plethora of natural beauty. To me there is no comparison. Islands, in my book, are places that make everything better. Since being back on this island, things have been better and I think to myself, "What a wonderful world."
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