A Summer Summary..and on to Year 2!

So...you thought I'd totally forgotten about the blog, right?  It's not that I forgot..but that I forgot to prioritize writing a post amid what turns out to be the craziness of being a graduate student during the summer!  Goodbye summer vacation and hello full-time research!

To briefly catch you up from my long break from writing..here's a brief summary of the summer:

• I finished my second semester, including completing a grad. course with my adviser in which I was introduced to the computer programs Perplex and TWQ.  Yippee for surviving my intro to thermobarometric modeling!
• Flew home for baby brother's high school graduation.
• Most of the summer I was working on a collaborative project with a visiting PhD student from University of Leeds, England.  He came and spent two months in our lab and I was assigned as his "buddy" and helped him learn lab techniques, design a plan of attack, run samples, etc.  Then once he left I have been finishing up the samples he did not complete.  Look for my first coauthored, peer-reviewed paper to hopefully be published in the next year!
• I also worked on some of my own samples...dating several more "test" detrital garnets from Vermont that were used for a coauthored presentation given by my adviser at the Goldschmidt Geochemistry Conference in June.  I got to go along and attend Goldschmidt as well, which was in Montreal this year!
• I was Maid of Honor in a wedding back home in July.
• My family came to visit me in Boston in August.

Now I am officially a second year PhD student!  Although I must admit..being a second year is a lot more pressure than being a first year.  I now have more responsibility, a to-do list that is much longer than I could ever hope to accomplish and qualifying/comprehensive exams looming on the horizon.  Currently I am finishing the last of the samples still lingering from the summer's projects, as well as taking one course (basically an applied stats course for geologists with an intro to Matlab thrown in for good measure).  I am also writing an application for the NSF graduate research fellowship program and trying not to get too worried about quals in the spring.  Sound like fun?

PS- If anyone has awesome advice on applying for an NSF GRFP...I'd love to hear it!