Time flies and research inches along but graduation only creeps closer.

I freely admit it...I have totally neglected the blog over the past academic year.  My excuse would be that "things have been crazy, unsettled, and really hectic around here," but the longer I am in graduate school the more I realize that anyone in academia probably claims the same excuse.

In the same format as several of my most recent posts, here is a partial summary of highlights from the past two semesters in no particular order:

• This month I become my adviser's most senior graduate student.  The labmate ahead of me defends her dissertation at the end of June and will be headed off to new science adventures. That puts my adviser back to three graduate students for this coming year.
• I applied for and was granted a Graduate Research Grant from the Geological Society of America to work on a comparative study of detrital garnet ages versus detrital zircon and monazite ages from modern sediments in the southern Appalachian mountains.  This study will be either the second or third chapter of my dissertation!  In addition, I was recognized as one of 10 (out of 774 total applicants) awarded an Outstanding Mention for exceptional merit in conception and presentation of my grant application.  There's a chance that I may be attending the GSA fall meeting in Vancouver.
• I completed two more classes.  I finally got to take a tectonics seminar and an isotope geochemistry course.  It's about time for an official isotopes course since I call myself an isotope geochemist..don't you think?!  Only two more courses to go during the remainder of my PhD.
• I am currently writing my first, first-author paper, which will also be the first completed chapter of my dissertation.  I presented part of the research that the paper is based on at the AGU fall meeting in San Francisco last December.
• During April and May I worked on a collaborative research project with Drs. Lenka and David Baratoux.  They came to Boston University as visiting scientists to date garnet from West African rocks as a part of the WAXI program (West African Exploration Initiative).  It is pretty exciting to be working on rocks that are being studied for the very first time!  I have been involved as an adviser for experiment planning, as a lab assistant as they learned the techniques for garnet geochronology here at BU, and as the lab tech for completing the clean-up work now that they have returned home.

The coming months should include work on preliminary data for a new grant application, completion of my first-author paper on garnet from the Jack Hills, and lots and lots of sample preparation for upcoming projects.  I'm also hoping to write a step-by-step methodology as I work in the lab this summer.  The plan is to include portions of that guide as blog posts illustrating what a day in the life of an isotope geochemist looks like.

In other news, I have been working on a brand new personal, academic website.  You can now find my personal page at www.kathryneccles.com.  Right now it is fairly basic and includes my professional background and current work, but soon I hope to add lab pictures, lesson plans, and more. I'm always open to suggestions for website improvements as I move towards graduation and job hunting in the next few years!

Away from Boston and Back Again: Christmas Break and a Research Update

Two weeks away from Boston for Christmas break, a week and a half back in Boston working on research without the distraction of classes, and the start of classes impending in the coming week.  It's been a busy month since I last wrote!

I went home to the Midwest to celebrate the holidays with family.  We had lots of laughter, family gatherings, time spent relaxing, present exchanges, and good memories.  Highlights included going to the Indianapolis Symphony to see the annual Christmas Yuletide show as well as having lunch with a good friend to see her new engagement ring!  While being home for two weeks was wonderful, all good things come to an end and it was back to Boston on January 4th.

The past week and a half I have been working on my research without the distraction of classes.  I must admit, having such large blocks of time for research tasks was productive but also pretty strange.  I'm used to doing 20 different things at once.  For example, a year ago I was student teaching full time in a rural high school and writing/defending a senior thesis at the same time and the semester before that I was taking 5 classes, including a couple upper level geology classes, while TAing for another 2 courses, working as a planetarium operator, working on research, and doing classroom observation hours.  The chance to focus on just research...well it's been a while since that chance came along.

It's been a fairly eventful week and a half in regards to research.  I have now learned most of the garnet dissolution and lab techniques that we use frequently and my first actual garnet samples should be analyzed within the next couple weeks... well as soon as the TIMS is working again.  For those of you unfamiliar with the TIMS, it is the main analytical instrument that our lab uses to generate chemical data on garnet.  I don't want to get into all of the particulars of the machine's operation or purpose at the moment (I'll save it for a more extensive post with pictures to illustrate) but suffice it to say that the solution for fixing the instrument involved disconnecting all of the electrical connections and probes, rolling a 900+ pound magnet away from the instrument, and using heating pads, internal heating elements, and insulating blankets to literally bake the instrument to high temperatures to burn off any accumulated debris from years of use.  I got to help our lab tech. go through the steps to prep the instrument for baking and learned a lot about the instrument in the process!  I have also been doing major sample preparation in anticipation of a trip to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI) this coming Friday for preliminary chemical analysis.  Keep an eye out for a post next week on my adventure to Woods Hole!

Reflecting on a PhD Beginning

It's been two weeks since I last wrote for my blog and the fact that I am doing it now means one thing- finals are over!  Now that I have completed finals, I can officially call my first semester as a PhD student complete!  This post is mostly a summary of the classes and research progress I made in my first semester, plus some musings about the year as a whole.  I wrote it for myself as a way of providing perspective on what I have accomplished, as a benchmark to record my progress, to encourage myself for the work ahead, and as a preemptive New Year's reflection.  I decided to share it publicly since a few of you may be interested in a progress update and to encourage you all to pursue reflection on your own accomplishments.

These past couple of weeks have been packed with two major projects, two comprehensive finals, and quite a bit of research.  This semester I completed two classes- Geochemistry and Mathematical Modeling.  Geochemistry was largely review of the basics I learned as an undergrad. and reinforcement and further development of topics that I picked up and taught myself while working on my senior research project.  The class was fairly straightforward and clearly applicable to my area of study without any significant stretch of the imagination.  Math Modeling, however, was a totally different challenge.  It focused on the use of partial differential equations and modeling to examine everything from diffusion to advection to stress and strain and is one of two courses required for all geology PhD students at BU.  For a geochemistry student who had never opened Matlab (a computer program that uses basic coding and commands for math computation and modeling), never had a course in differential equations, and had not been in an advanced math course since senior year of high school, the whole idea was daunting.  If you had told me as an undergrad that my first semester in graduate school I would be required to take a course that covered these topics and that I would successfully produce a one-dimensional model that shows diffusion of Mn in garnet both analytically and numerically as my final project, I would have told you that you were crazy. As I went through the class it was often difficult to see any progress being made amid struggles to follow the lectures and to find any possible application of the class topics to my research area.  But now that the class is done, it is much easier to look back through the struggle and to appreciate how my thinking and skill sets have changed, how I have gained a new appreciation of diffusion and its relevance to the mineral analysis that I already love, and even how new topics that I was exposed to during this class could benefit my research in the future.  This is a large part of the reason that I pursued graduate work in the first place and it has been exciting to be able to see personal growth when I picked up a paper that went over my head six months ago that I can now understand or when I was able to correct a typo in Fortran code used in modeling that other scientists missed.

"All things good to know are difficult to learn."- Greek Proverb    

Besides classes, my other major task has been to begin the research which will eventually become my dissertation.  I've already started to share some of the research tasks that I have worked on this semester with you through my blog, and there are many others that I have been learning but haven't had time to share yet.  I have plenty of material for future science blog posts!  I am now one chemistry and one analytic step away from generating my first set of detrital garnet analyses.  I have done sample preparation on material from three different locations total, which will allow me to push forward their chemistry in coming months.  I have started a test that will be used to directly compare and analyze the accuracy of the ages produced by detrital garnet geochronology to the ages generated by the lab's currently accepted techniques for dating garnet from metamorphic rocks.  Not bad for 3.5 months and having to learn all the techniques from scratch, although I think it is the nature of the scientist to always wish for more progress. :-)

Exactly one year ago, I was a senior undergraduate student at a small private school in the Midwest.  I was submitting my finalized applications to graduate schools across the country, preparing to student teach during the final semester of undergrad. (Spring of 2011) and knew big changes were coming in my life.  Since then I completed one semester of full-time teaching experience in a rural high school, defended my senior thesis, graduated at the top of my class, chose a graduate program, went abroad for the first time to complete fieldwork in Scotland, moved across the country to Boston, and I have now completed a full semester as a PhD graduate student.  It constantly amazes me how much can happen in a year, and I can only imagine what this coming year is going to bring! (Here's hoping the coming year brings my name as a coauthor on a peer-reviewed, published paper!)