Hurricane Sandy visits Boston

I suppose I can now say that I have been through my first hurricane.  Growing up in the Midwest, hurricanes were something that I only heard about on the news.  I would watch videos of rain jacket clad weathermen struggling to stand upright, but I never really expected to see it firsthand.

Hurricane Sandy brought plenty of rain and wind to Boston yesterday, but for us the worst is past.  Yesterday Boston University closed both campuses and the MBTA stopped all mass transit service at 2PM.  My roommates and I stayed home and settled in for a day of matlab homework and studying, as the wind gradually picked up throughout the day.  By early afternoon we were watching people who had gone to work in the morning head home and struggle to stand upright in the wind.  As the day went on, the storm only continued to grow.  According to the National Weather Service, by evening we had reached peak wind gusts of 64mph in the area where I live.  We could see trees across the street swaying back and forth and rain pelted our windows.  This continued for several hours but eventually the winds began to die down and the storm quieted overnight.

Despite the hurricane yesterday, this morning Boston is already getting back to business as usual.  As I walked to work this morning I saw some branches down and leaves littered the streets, but the day feels more like a rainy spring day than the morning after a hurricane.  The MBTA has been running since 8AM and BU officially reopens at 11AM (though many grad students have been back to work for a couple hours already!).  Power is still out for thousands of people across the state but it is slowly being restored and much of the city is already up and running.  [In fact, most of the area where I live never lost power- even during the peak of the storm.]  All in all...Boston dodged the worst of it.

Sadly New York and New Jersey did not fare as well.  Our thoughts and prayers will be with them as they face a long cleanup process and try to put their lives back together.

PS- Science did not stop for the hurricane.  I worked on matlab from home but evidently one of my labmates ran the TIMS during the hurricane and the other was so focused on writing his dissertation he didn't notice that a tree fell in his front yard.  Ah grad student life.

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!