Week 8: 07/27/09 - 07/31/09

I can't believe that week 8 has already come and gone. This week was really the most indicative of my readiness/willingness to go straight on to Grad school. I know that at grad school, you have to be much more of a self-directed learner and I am not really ready for that yet. I do hope to go on to grad school, but at a time where feeling completely lost every day does not seem so daunting.

I started out this week preparing to work on my own because my mentor was leaving on Wednesday and was going to return on the following Monday. It is so different to work on a project by myself and to work on it with my mentor. We finished the processing program (YEY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)and we just had to run through all of the outputs of the program and see how they fit into my project. I am very worried that I will not be able to finish my project on time, though my mentor Nirzwan is much more optimistic about the outcome.

We also met with my senior scientist Antonio Baptista and shared the results of the processed data. This meeting of course resulted in a list of things to change for my eventual presentation. Luckily, everything was very doable.

My mentor then left me with a large list of things to do while he was gone. What once seemed like simple tasks now seemed daunting. I have absolute respect for all of the interns who were able to work effectively with their mentors gone. I hadn't realized how much I depended on my mentor for.

I was able to be productive, though not nearly as productive as before. Sad to say, but I actually missed having those deadlines for getting results(and this is about the time that I had my epiphany about grad school).

I spent the rest of the week doing a major literature review, which was helpful as I hadn't really been dealing with my part of the project for some time. I also started to type out all of my known facts and variables. It turns out that we are going to have to make several assumptions on the variables. For example, even though the density of water changes with salinity, we are going to assume (at least initially) that the max salinity is the constant value present at the SATURN 3 observation center. I don't like that we have to make all of these assumptions.

I also attended a talk given by my senior scientist Antonio about future jobs in coastal observation. The talk was quite informative and I will have to remember this talk when I choose my career path. Then the hearty played a roasting game of soccer. We kept playing even though it was 90 out : ). Our weekly soccer games are really starting to get exciting.

Friday was filled with presentations. I attended a thesis defense about the Columbia River Plume and the salmon's dependence on the plume. The defense was surprisingly short (about an hour and a half). Alex, another intern, then gave her final presentation giving me an idea of the general format.