I'm a 3rd year?!

Now that the brand new crop of first year graduate students are starting to arrive, I will officially have to introduce myself as a third year PhD candidate.  I remember meeting one of the third year students when I first started grad. school and thinking "Wow!  She has it all together and knows what she's doing!"  Now I am supposed to be the third year student who has it all together...and some days it certainly doesn't seem like that'll ever be true!

Also, two of the brand new students are joining my adviser's lab group- which means I am no longer the "baby" of my adviser's students.  I am moving up to "middle child" status and looking forward to it.  :-)

As I think ahead to the coming year (or even more immediately to fall semester), there are potentially some big research goals ahead!

• Present research at AGU.  I am going to the AGU conference in San Francisco, CA in December for the first time.  I am very excited that I will finally be able to share my most recent research, present some cool old garnet ages, and see lots of science.  (Plus it's my first visit to San Francisco and I'll get to meet up with an old friend or two!)
• Write and submit for publication my first, first-author paper.  It's time to tackle my first paper!  It's going to cover the same research being presented at AGU.  Then I will finally be able to openly share what I have been working on for the past year.
• Lots and lots of lab work.  I think it's pretty self-explanatory- I need to generate as many quality garnet ages as possible on rocks from around the globe.
• Hopefully some field work!  Who doesn't want to go look at some of Earth's oldest rocks in northern Canada or Greenland?!
• At least two more classes.  I finally get to take isotope geochemistry.  About time, since I'm an isotope geochemist!

Here's to another year of graduate school adventures and LOTS of science ahead!

(Bonus update: This week I officially hit my 300th sample run on the TIMS.  Time for a new log book!  I also made the mistake of calculating how much time that means I've spent sitting in the TIMS chair and running the instrument and came up with a rough estimate of more than a month's worth of 12 hour days.)