Mad Dreams

I woke up the other day from a geology dream where I was excited to bust out my hand lens and identify the grains in a rock. Some people like to call these nightmares or bad dreams, but since I'm a little crazy, I'll call them Mad Dreams: proof that attending Mines has ruined me. This post has taken me four years to write because every time I have a super nerdy dream, I try to write it down here.

I had another science dream last night. I woke up disturbed, not by the dream, but by the fact that I should really just finally publish this post. In my dream, I was at a Geophysics conference with my classmate Emily H. We had a big homework assignment due the next day, though, which consisted of taking partial derivatives of things that were in a three-by-three matrix. The conference was also an amusement park, and all our professors were there.

But let's start with my dreams from the beginning, all the way back from freshman year...

I had a dream that I was in Green Center 215 in Calc II. For some reason we were doing the test in class (tests for this class are done after class). I wrote my name and did one problem. I had to go get something, so I left the room and building and went to go get it. It ended up taking longer than I thought. I think I went to the grocery store to get some milk, and there was this big escalator in Brown Building run by UNC students. They dropped my gallon of milk and it splattered everywhere. I rode down the escalator and began to hurry to make my way back to the classroom, for my one and a half hours to finish the test were almost up. I got there just as it had ended, and my professor started talking about how disappointed she was in some people. I just stared at my empty test...but for some reason, someone else had written a bunch of stuff on it--maybe getting me partial credit, but no doubt they crossed the line of academic dishonesty. I was so sad and angry at myself for making me fail this test. Then I heard my real-life alarm clock ring, and still sleeping, I got excited. "Maybe this was all a dream and when I wake for for real, I'll get a chance to not fail my test!" I woke up. There was no test.

Even before college, I always used to have this dream. The dream that I couldn't find my classes on the first day of school. Before sophomore year, it happened again. I knew I had Introduction to Geophysics at 9, but that's it. I lost my schedule and slept in the first day of school. I was horrified. But there was free pie in the Maple Lobby, so it was okay.
I once dreamed I was a Geophysics and Geology double major. I woke up disturbed.

I was just informed of my score on the Physics free-response question. So that night, I dreamed of the possibilities of what the TAs marked me down on. I dreamed that they didn't like my drawing of a box. In real life, they liked my drawing of a dinosaur.

I had an Econ exam the Wednesday after Thanksgiving Break. So during the break one night a dreamed that it was late Tuesday night/early Wednesday morning and I had not studied for the Econ test and was certain to fail. It was horrible. In real life, it was also horrible.

On a Friday night, I had a dream that someone turned in a 19-page article for the Oredigger I had to edit. I thought to myself, "We can't print this", but still edited it. I had a hunch that the writer copied and pasted, or plainly downloaded the pdf from somewhere else. Either that or they were a huge nerd about the topic they were writing about.

The night after my Calc III final, I was still doing Calc in my dreams. There was a Stoke's Theorem problem, and I was finding the curl.

In the early weeks of my first summer internship, I had a dream that I was in a new room for a Geophysics class- my first one, so it must've been AEM- waiting for class to start, when I realized that I never bought new school supplies and had to use loose-leaf paper. Terry was disappointed in me.

The week after the first Dynamic Fields midterm, I dreamed that I got my test back and it had "90" written on the front. I knew I failed this test, so I was quite weirded out that I had scored so high. But upon further inspection, the 9 was actually a 4 because Andre's handwriting is so confusing. So it made more sense to me that I had gotten a 40. In real life, I got a 50.

I had a dream about fracking one night. I could see a 2D cross-section as it was happening.

At field camp, I would dream about being out in the field. Mostly doing mundane things, like walking the line taking magnetic measurements.

After the 2014 AGU Fall Meeting, where I orally presented my research that had to do with geomagnetic storms, I had a dream that I was back at the meeting, but this time had a poster presentation and was explaining my research to some famous scientist lady. I was pretty intimidated. In a sub-dream, I was in a city somewhere, and could see the northern lights.

I dreamed that Colton took over MIT's supercomputer. No big deal.

While I was a grader for Intro GravMag, I had a dream that I was a TA for field camp to help with processing GravMag, so only the second half of field camp. I knew that Michael should have been Field Camp Dictator because his reports were always great in GravMag. So I show up to CTLM and Michael is on the Gravity team. I was very disturbed, thinking that this shouldn't happen. Plus Michael told me the pair of students who were dictator, and that disturbed me even more. I told Michael my dream, and in real life he became Dictator a few months later.

I dreamed that I was looking out the one Green Center window, and a tornado was coming down. Mick was teaching in GC215 (maybe he was heading up a study session?), and announced that there was a fire. So there was a fire and tornado at the same time. Great.

During Spring Break senior year, in the midst of a monstrous assignment, I dreamed that I was working on my Inversion code in MATLAB. It didn't work.

My LAIS teacher didn't like my final presentation in my dream, and made me give another one. On a completely different topic, I think.

It might be a long time before I heal from the emotional damage caused by the process of obtaining a Mines degree. I will likely have similar dreams forever. But for now, I'm okay with that.

Fluid Mechanics

Deposition and erosion. Everything is deposition and erosion. Mountains climbing higher and higher, being scraped of their skin by water and ice. Sediments are carried for miles and miles, leaving only the strongest bits.

Everything is stress and strain. Even deposition and erosion. Life piles on more and more layers and sheets of paper with lists of things to do. What is the failing point? Like caramel stretches farther and farther until it breaks. Like an abused rock cracks after being squeezed so much. Deformation is caused by stress and strain. The heart beats. Extension and compression.

A pebble becomes entrained and makes a great journey downstream. Fluid mechanics.Weaving through a crowd of students. Mist crawls over the mountains signaling that it's a good day to sit and drink a cup of coffee.

Heat flow controls everything. Stress and strain. Deposition and Erosion. The transformation of a cake from goo to deliciousness. Mmm...remember infinite cake?

Dispersion and propagation can describe anything. Heat flow is dispersion. Light propagates. Waves of sea water crash onto the rock face. Erosion.

Yet timing is everything.

I realize this more so than ever. There is an hour glass of pitch and an hour glass of very fine sand that were turned over at the same time. Time crawls but is escaping way too quickly.

Pressure Gradients and Uncertainty

Lately, I've been losing sleep. Part of it is Nyquil withdrawal. I was sick for two weeks straight (since Thanksgiving week), so I was on Nyquil cough syrup for those same two weeks so the cough attacks would have a less chance of shaking me from my sleep. Unfortunately for my sleep schedule, the end of the semester also coincides with me pumping caffeine into my blood system.

The other part of it are the things that take up my thoughts. Thoughts of mostly uncertainty in data analysis and uncertainty in life. At least the semester is almost over.

Oh. The semester is almost over.

The M on Mount Zion in Golden has a countdown each semester to the number of days until graduation for the last nine days. We've now seen it seven times.

"Look at the M. Next time it will be for us."

***

A rallying cry for the Geophysics Junior's hardest class that we Seniors stumbled into

It is during the last ten minutes of a last final of the week that one probably is the most unmotivated. I was particularly unmotivated during this semester's last one, for it was an open computer final and had concepts that contradicted fundamentals from the final I just took an hour earlier.

Plus my hand hurt from writing so much. Even though I stayed up until 2AM studying on accident, I wasn't stressed out about finals. I have done it so many times by now. I was more stressed out about getting my talk finished and everything else. After Tuesday...I would be relaxed.

***

The semester is now over, and the tail end of the year quickly following after it. My sources of December stress are resolved, but uncertainty carries into 2015.

The year I graduate college. The year I start grad school...somewhere.

I was able to reset my sleeping schedule at the AGU Fall Meeting, ironically. Usually people don't get much sleep at giant earth science conferences, but the first two days had me waking up at 6:30AM to prepare for my talk, which was on Tuesday afternoon.

This AGU Fall Meeting was my second, but already was very different from my first, when I was overwhelmed by the bigness of geoscience and taking in the amazing facets of our field of study. This year, my Fall Meeting was defined by prep for my talk and networking. And sushi. I ate sushi twice. (Can I just say how much I love that NSF supports my caffeine and food habit?)

Networking is actually cool because these are my kind of nerds: from people who sing and write poems about geoscience to people who I might be working with in the future. My week was also busy catching up with multiple circles of friends that converged at AGU: Mines Geophysics peeps, 2014 REU friends, and 2013 REU friends. 

My talk went well, and though it was a lot of pressure, it was a huge honor and actually a lot of fun to give. I ended up being up a lot less nervous than I expected it being my first AGU talk. Probably because I was singing in my head the entire talk before mine.

"Ain't no mountain high enough..."

***

It's my last trip of the year. From my first trip of driving through the Arizona desert during Spring Break and receiving the email that I was accepted to the Haystack REU, to the drive to Field Camp, DEN to BOS, BOS to SEA, SEA to BOS, BOS to YYC, driving back from Calgary, DEN to SFO, SFO to DEN.

What's next?

I can't begin to think about going back to school right now and starting my final semester at Mines and all the uncertainty beyond that. I just want to stare at geology from thirty thousand miles above the ground.

The Sierra Nevadas

Geophysics Field Camp Week Four: Onwards, Upwards

The view as our caravan left Pagosa Springs, CO

"Remember this moment," Dr. Hale said to us at the end of the final presentation. "There have been only a few times in my life where the geophysics gives something completely unexpected."

We did it. We survived Colorado School of Mines Geophysics Field Camp. And in style, too, as our professors, industry people, and our beloved department head said it was the best Geophysics Field Camp they had seen in their years at Mines. All the early mornings and those two late nights and the weird weather and the orange vests and wanting to kill our classmates and loving our classmates to death and funk music and spilled coffee and being annoyed at geophysics and being convinced that geophysics is awesome went into those four weeks. And in the end, it an incredible experience.

It is such a privileged to be able to do geophysics in every stage of its process on an area that no one has seen down in the subsurface before. "You're right, this isn't Kafadar Commons anymore," Andrei said to me after we got so excited from the preliminary seismic section. Doing geophysics on Kafadar is incredibly uninteresting, when it comes to the subsurface. Doing geophysics on the unknown is exciting. It's like being an explorer.

Here I am getting ready to drive and operate the vibroseis truck.
Andrei is in the background, waiting for me to hurry up. 

***

People hate airports and fly all the time, but for me, it never gets old. I rolled to the United terminal and the sign above me advertised Mines. As if it needs my attention some more.

Where is the water coming from? Where is the water going? Two important questions when doing a geothermal investigation.

Where are we coming from? Mines.  And before that, other various places that all combined to lead us to here.

Where are we going? 

***

"So how does it feel to officially be a senior?" Michelle, the Geophysics Department assistant asked at the End-Of-Field-Session BBQ right after our final presentation.

I responded with 10% sarcasm: "It's surreal. I feel like this year and field session have all culminated in my geophysical journey though Mines as a sort of rite of passage to make us seniors."

"But now there's Senior Year..."

"Yeah. But in all seriousness, as I told Austin earlier, we've made it through Junior Year, and now we've made it through Field Camp. We can do anything."

***

I actually ate breakfast that morning at the airport. I never eat breakfast other than coffee. While I finished my sandwich, the television report showed something about California Chrome. I laughed. California Chrome was the name of Craig's (one of the TAs) van. I guess Field Camp held some fun times.

I was exhausted. My brain had been going non-stop since...well, January. The swift transition from school to Field Camp to summer internship had left me no time for processing (mental processing, not data processing). Even while going through security my brain did not fully comprehend that those four weeks were over, and I was moving on to Massachusetts for my summer internship. I was so glad that Field Session was over. And thinking back, I was pretty miserable academically right before that, yearning for Field Session to start. I had spent my time looking forward to things ending. I even dreamed about graduating during those four weeks.

Where am I coming from? I knew this.

Where am I going?

I buckled up and sat for a while, waiting for the plane to take off. It began rolling. It began rolling slightly faster. Then it pivoted onto the runway. It stopped. Then, WHOOOOSHH! 

It was then when I realized where I was going; where my classmates were going.

Onwards, upwards.

The 2014 Colorado School of Mines Geophysics Field Camp (photo by Dawn)

Geophysics Field Camp Week Three: I Like Processing Things

Out in the field, I had geophysics dreams.

I was walking along the survey line taking measurements with the magnetometer. I wasn’t the only one who had geophysics dreams out in the field. Our professor and field camp coordinator Andrei (more affectionately known as "Swiddy" or "Dr. Drei.") said he had dreams about driving around in his truck, making sure everything was going well. My classmate Roy said he had a dream about a geophysics survey as well.

Back in Golden in front of a computer, the hours are less intense than when we were out in the field. Geophysics doesn’t take over our entire lives…well, at least we get weekends back here.

But geophysics still takes over my dreams.

I’m part of a two-woman team that is processing the gravity data from our geophysical surveys down near Pagosa Springs, Colorado. Gravity processing is fairly uncomplicated, and as a result, we have been able to get things done relatively quickly. First we had to apply some corrections to the data, since gravity measurements are sensitive to elevation, latitude, and terrain/topography. Then came the fun part of creating a model for our data. This consists of drawing a geologic model of the subsurface in a program. The program tells us how well our model matches our data, and we tweak the model to reduce error but at the same time to agree with the interpretations that our classmates in other methods are producing. The past couple of days have mostly consisted of forward modeling for us.

Our working forward model of the subsurface created in GMSYS. It fits the data pretty well.

All this gravity gets into my head I think, because I had a dream that the Gravity and Magnetics team was racing to get everything done before everyone else. Which is weird because in real life, we really don’t need to race.

At any rate, I'm enjoying the computers part much more than the exhausting part. It’s not as fun in some ways of course, but I love the fact that my team is on track and that we don’t have to do geophysics stuff from 7AM until 6PM anymore. Our classmates in charge play funky music. Sometimes there are donuts. One day I ate two donuts. It's a good environment for geophysics. 

Out in the field, I would shovel my lunch into my mouth and be done in ten minutes.

Back in the lab, I go make myself a nice sandwich and savor the hour lunch break we get to take.

Out in the field, time would fly in the flurry of activity that geophysical surveying is.

Back in the lab, it’s more relaxed, at least in this third week. We get time to process processing.

I like processing things…I like being able to think about something and understand it. I have also had time to mentally process the field part of field camp and catch up on sleep. As one of my friends in the GP class of 2014 said, "It's the most fun you never want to have again." So true. 

I had another dream. I was helping the EM team (electromagnetics) write their report while they did some processing stuff. That dream was way too realistic, because it ended up happening. To add to the list of realistic geophysics dreams, Roy said he had a dream that he was processing the EM data. This also continued to happen. My classmate Tiffany had a dream about a bear, which makes sense because we saw a bear almost every day out in the field, but the part where the bear attacked did not come true.

I wonder if I will ever have ordinary dreams again, such as the ones I used to have a a kid; dreams containing tornadoes, tsunamis, and giant earthquakes that are geophysically inaccurate. 

Geophysics Field Camp Week One

Geophysics knows no weekends.

I completely forgot it was Saturday in the midst of surveying. We're working for eleven days straight of data collecting without weekends. Whatever. One week down, one more week in the field, and then two more back in Golden. It's gone by pretty quickly, mostly because we're constantly busy. I'm also extremely exhausted. My feet hurt. Quiet or alone time is hard to come by. The food's okay.

Alright. I think I have my complaining out of my system. Field Camp is mostly cool, a lot of hard work, and some parts awesomely weird. I wake up at 6:15AM angry at the world and myself for not getting to bed sooner. When I have my coffee at 7, I'm extremely happy and cheerful, sitting down at our morning meeting saying, "Good morning, Terry! Good morning, Andrei! How's it going, class mates?" and such. Depending on what's being talked about, around 8 I feel meh. Then we get out in the field after driving for a half hour, and then I'm like, "Yay, Geophysics!" until 4. Then we go back to our meeting place and then I start getting frustrated, especially if the data takes a long time to download. I become extremely hungry and moody until 6, and then I'm happy but exhausted. At around 9 I stop being tired and then don't get to bed around 11 or 11:30 because I don't think I need to. But then I wake up at 6:15 again the next day.

Field camp is also awesomely weird. Our class is weird. Our professors know so, even if they are weird themselves with their own quirks. Geophysics people in general have this awesome weirdness about them. We're the weirdest thing to happen to the small town of Pagosa Springs in...well, a year.

I hope to blog every week, but here are a few quotes from last week so far. I have been taking notes in my field notebook, but the TA didn't give it back to me tonight.

"Last one in the vans is a geologist!"

"There are more buttons in this truck than the MT equipment!" Andrei

"Do these trucks automatically downshift? Because mine just did." - Andrei

"Look! Geology IS useful!" - Batzle, after propping a door with a rock.

"Geophysics girls get frisky." Craig the TA, who might have been joking around.

"That DC inversion was beautiful." "And it's not even smoothed yet, just raw beauty." "No makeup and still a ten."

"Geophysicist uses GPR...it's not very effective." Roy

"I'd rather grades you all's tests than listen to Rod Stewart." Rich, who hates grading exams

"We can fill up at the Flowing Well." - Shane, on this oil seep in a field (we almost ran out of gas).

But yeah. The highlights of my day include hanging out with professors on the line, in the car, and elsewhere, watching a pickup truck accidentally roll into our headquarters building, getting malts at the malt shoppe while the boys got girly temporary tattoos, having way too much fun on the walkie talkies, getting called an idiot after I asked my professor Rich to (it's an honor, believe me), having Dr. Bob call our geologic cross section "elegant", our department head's sense of humor, and joking around with the TAs.

Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday left for data acquisition. I will make it to the weekend after the longest week of my life.

Thoughts Running Through My Head During the Continuum Mechanics Final

Jeff, our professor, begins passing our tests out. Gosh, Jeff. What the heck, this test is huge! There are so many words! Uhh..let's see, do I have an equation for this problem? No? Crap crap crap crap crap. Test: "What is the word for the temperature gradient in the mantle?" Hot? Uhh...let's look at the quantitative stuff.  Better plug some numbers into my calculator and pretend I know what I'm doing.  I have literally never seen this type of problem before. Maybe I can figure it out. My brain hurts. Let's write down an equation and move on to the next problem. Test: "Explain in words..." No words, just math--wait I can't even do that so never mind. 

Well, it's been an hour and I'm getting nowhere. I'm kind of hungry. I wonder if everyone else thinks this test is terrible too. Emily sure is writing down a lot of stuff. Hmm, I bet Jeff thinks I'm stupid. Maybe taking his Planetary Geophysics class next Fall isn't a good idea for me. Hmm. Jeff: "One hour and 27 cupcakes left." Jake gets up. "Jake can you grab me a cupcake too?" I ask. "Thanks." Stuffing my face is the only good thing about this test right now. I hope I can still get into grad school after this test. Why am I in Geophysics again? Is it too late to switch majors? Yeah, it's pretty late. Maybe I should become a writer.  I bet English majors can BS their entire tests. I bet they hardly ever have moments where they are thinking, "I have no idea what to do right now and we never learned this before!" Maybe if I write an essay or story on this test, Jeff will be appeased. I'm getting really hungry now. Only had a sip of coffee for breakfast. 

Dimensional analysis...wait, okay so Pascals are Newtons over meters squared. But what's a Newton again? Oh God, oh God, I can't believe I forgot what a Newton is. How the heck am I supposed to figure this out?? I should have written it down on my equation sheet, dang it. [a few minutes later] Oh! I can just do F=ma. Bam! Better check and make sure...three times. I'm getting really hungry now. I wonder if people will want to go out to eat. BUZZZZZ. Oh crap, there's the alarm again. We have 25 minutes. In just 25 minutes, it'll all be over!! Maybe I should just turn in my test now...naw, I better battle it out. I wonder if I'll get partial credit if I write "42" on everything? BUZZZZ. Okay, fifteen more minutes. Better write down any relevant equations. Maybe I should write "I'm sorry" on the test? Why, Jeff, why? 

Jeff: "Alright, time to turn in your tests." It's all over...it's finally all over!

The Viscosity of Maple Syrup, and Other Breakfast Properties

The viscosity of a fluid depends on temperature and pressure. It measures how resistant to stress a material is, and is expressed in units of pressure times seconds.

There are a few important things about any material. Strength of the actual material, porosity (or how many pores are in a certain area), and permeability are a few properties.
But some would argue that the most important characteristic would be the fluid inside the material.

This is what I was thinking of when I poured a slightly viscous and mostly sweet non-Newtonian liquid over a layer of permeable pancakes. Those layers of the stack were deposited over time, just as sedimentary layers are.
Yet they resemble the flat overlapping volcanoes on the planet Venus.

Does a pancake's porosity correlate to its taste?
Is there an ideal permeability of the layers that the viscous liquid will have the ideal concentration in?

Grains are classified according to size. There are boulders, cobbles, pebbles, sand, silt, and clay.

The pebbles of coffee beans are eroded down to sand--coarse, medium, and then fine sand.
Depending on how strong I want the coffee to be, I grind it down to silt.

Grain size affects porosity.
Porosity affects strength.
Strength affects taste and how awake I am.

Two heaping scoops for every cup of water, and another scoop for good measure. And maybe another dash to prevent against weak coffee. A semi-quantifiable algorithm.

The tensile strength of bacon, the permittivity of orange juice, and the bulk modulus of scrambled eggs...

Perhaps a pancake's porosity correlates to taste, but taste is only semi-quantifiable as bleh, meh, delicious.

The taste of syrup is positively correlated to viscosity. Making my permeable pancakes filled with viscous maple syrup delicious along with my strong, light-absorbing coffee.

That is how you have physics for breakfast.

My First GeoRodeo: Post-Meeting Thoughts

I've had two weeks to recover and process the firehose/volcano/tsunami of information that was dispersed at the AGU Fall Meeting. At the time of my mid-Meeting post, I was in awe of how huge the Meeting is, and had not even presented my poster yet. So Thursday morning, I woke up before dawn and then scurried to a cafe with Emily, my internship friend who was also presenting that morning. Both of us had our poster tubes in hand. Being all official scientists and stuff. 

Where the poster-presenting shenanigans occur.

Presenting my first poster at AGU was a great experience. It really highlighted one of my favorite things about the Meeting: The eagerness of scientists all over the world to learn. Nearly everyone I spoke with was super friendly and had great feedback on my summer research. It was crazy both how quickly and slowly the five hours by my poster passed--that's a long time to be talking science. My throat was dry afterwards. 

Me at 7:59AMish, ready to present.

After my presentation, the Meeting for me winded down, as I attended a great talk given by my mentor later that evening, and then a session called "Geoscience Through the Lens of Art" the following morning. It was the perfect ending to a very exploratory experience for me in my first Fall Meeting.

A few conclusions:

• I'm more than ever certain I want to pursue a PhD. In what specifically? I have some time to figure that out. 
• I'm only 63% done with my CSM Geophysics degree, but AGU gave another glimpse of how good the program is, even if I harp on it sometimes about it being very exploration-focused. It was really cool to hop around learning more about different facets of geoscience, but it was cooler that I could follow what the presenters spoke of, from induced polarization as I learned in Electrical Methods and Dynamic Fields to climate change models as I learned all summer. 
• Sending us to AGU was really the cherry on top of everything from our REU at CMMAP. When I was applying a year ago to research internships, I could not have imagined they would have flown me halfway across the country in an awesome hotel--all for the love of science. Well played, NSF. Well played. It worked. And I highly recommend to my fellow science-lovers to apply to REUs. 
• Hanging out with the seniors and a couple grad students in Mines Geophysics was really cool, especially since I didn't know most of them before. It's always fun to be around like-minded people who love science for science. But it also reminded me of how awesome the class of 2015 is. I can't wait for many of us to travel to San Francisco next Fall. As far as topics go, there will be something for everyone, and as far as the city goes, we're going to have a blast. 
• I really, really, really, really love food. Sushi, sea food, sourdough and chowder, and more...You taste amazing, SF. 

 I will be back next year, San Francisco. I will be back. 

The Bigness of Geoscience: Mid-Meeting Thoughts

From charges lying on bacteria in the ground to kilometer-sized gravity anomalies on the moon, geoscience is HUGE. The AGU Fall Meeting is huge too, but maybe on a couple orders of magnitude less than huge. The amount of coffee consumed here is HUGE, but not as huge as the amount of knowledge consumed. There are so many talks on so many topics, and a million (I may be off on my estimate) more posters on more topics. The titles of said talks and posters have so many words in them. There are thousands of important earth scientists concentrated into a two-block radius. Everything is so big.

In case I haven't explained the reason of my excitement to you in person, the AGU (American Geophysical Union) Fall Meeting is an annual earth science conference held in San Francisco. I have the privilege of attending because of the research internship I had this past summer with CMMAP (Center for Multiscale Modeling of Atmospheric Processes) at Colorado State University. They are paying me to basically be in science heaven and present my research among the thousands others. It's pretty cool.

For those who have attended a Career Fair, particularly the one at Colorado School of Mines, imagine a super-duper-sized Career Fair, but instead of talking about getting oil, everyone is interested in science. That is only the exhibit hall. And there's the poster hall which takes forever to walk across from. And the countless talks simultaneously occurring.

It's overwhelming because as a third year undergrad, I don't really know exactly where in geoscience I want to go. Being a Geophysics major seems so general here. So the Meeting is a sampler of sorts. On the other hand, I am really grateful for my Mines education that has taught me so much, and my internship that taught me other aspects of earth science. I've attended lectures on Climate Change, Modeling, Induced Polarization in Bacteria, gravity remote sensing on the moon, numerical methods, and I've been able to somewhat understand them with my background knowledge. Until my coffee runs out. But AGU understands us scientists and our need for free coffee.

It's not just the caffeine in my blood: I'm excited about earth science right now, not gonna lie. Gotta go get more free swag and/or knowledge now. Over and out.

How I See God's Character Revealed Through Math

For those who haven't had the pleasure of hearing me gripe first-hand, let me tell you about Dynamic Fields:

I hate not knowing what's going on. It's the worst feeling.

I need to know what's going on, what I'm supposed to be learning, and what I can expect in the future. One way for me to know what's going on  is to be in charge and in control of it. Many Mines students probably hold this sentiment as well: they've worked hard to get where they are now, and that is now leading them to getting a degree that will make money. We think we can control most of that.

So when we don't know what's going on, we lose control over the future of our academic careers, in a way.

But what's even worse is when that feeling spills over into real life.

Last post I talked about how I actually love turbulence, but I like order. The definiteness and clarity of processes that I desire in real life are probably reasons I went into studying something like engineering and science, fields dominated by process, order, data, analysis, results, and the flowcharts that describe the whole thing.

That's the way I am. And it's a reason I sort of dislike geology, with its subjectiveness and ambiguity and such. Interpreting blurred lines, such as seismic, is sometimes difficult because of some of the same reasons. Now you see how not knowing what's going on is so difficult for me. It's like scrolling through lines upon lines of computer code looking for the syntax error and running it not knowing why your code isn't quite what you want it to be. And you thought your code was so orderly and logical.

I walk down the hall from Dynamic Fields feeling worried, frustrated, lost, even angry, and tired. I feel like I don't belong here, like I want to give up. The area in front of the room for Advanced Engineering Math (AEM) fills up with chatter and complaints about the proceeding Dynamic Fields lecture or nightmare of an exam. I sit down in my usual chair in AEM and after being walked through a few equations on the board, understand that somehow, everything is okay or at least will be eventually. 

Math is constant. It has always been there as a subject, and it is usually a confidence booster. Usually.
But it's structured well. You know what you're supposed to be learning, or know what formulas or methods to use, and know the extent of work you'll have to put in to do well. There's usually a point in Math. And it's the basis of everything we do in engineering and science.

I feel like life sometimes feels a little like Dynamic Fields: messy, complex, incomprehensible, and I have no idea what's going on. I see God's character revealed through math: constant, purposeful, and knowing.

 Realization: life is not a script, function, or lines of code. Of course it'd be simpler if it was. Of course it'd be a great deal more boring.

Sometimes looking ahead in Math, I get a glimpse of a crazy complicated equation with symbols I don't yet understand. Yet I know we'll learn about it and get there...eventually. It's like God when I'm frustrated that I don't know what's going on is saying, "Don't worry, we'll get there....eventually."

Parallel Slope Lines

TIME = 1:(infinity);

1:length(TIME)....[or in English: from now until the length of time]...

Lately I've been thinking. Well, not like that's big news (I think I think too much), and screw it- I'm usually thinking about the past, future, or present unless I'm not thinking (which is entirely possible and probable when I feel like a zombie)- so let's just get to the point.

My thoughts take me back to the summer of 2010, the summer between my junior and senior year of high school. Yep, back in the day.

Finishing up what was a hell year of junior year, I took my ACT and SAT tests and was planning on majoring in Meteorology at Metro State College of Denver or University of Northern Colorado. My mom found this program for minority students interested in math, science, and engineering. I applied, and was accepted, along with twenty-something other high-schoolers.

There's really no way to completely prepare for being on your own for the first time, and for three weeks straight. And there's really no way to know what to expect of the Colorado School of Mines when you've never been exposed to it before. Thus was SUMMET. I had no idea what I was getting myself into for the next five years. All 16-year-old me knew was that I would get a taste of college.

There are certain undeniable stages of growing up. The first is when you are only allowed half a package of Swiss Cake Rolls. The second is when you have the freedom to buy your own box, as I wrote in a note one night:

Swiss Cake Rolls and Junk Food. Yeah! 

Thursday, July 22, 2010 at 10:19pm
Isn't it weird when you buy your first box of Swiss Cake Rolls by yourself with your own money and you're looking forward to eating them all by yourself....something you've never been able to do before in your whole life...then you don't really feel like eating the whole box, and you decide to share them...weird.Oh, yeah, we went to Safeway and we were the crazy kids buying junk food at 9 oclock; some of us were in pj's (not me!)

So, what's the best method of picking out an ice cream flavor? First, you see what's the cheapest personal size. Then, you choose the brand that has more ounces. If you have it narrowed down to a few varieties, than choose the one with the most calories! Yeah! Now that's what I call the best way to pick out junk food!

Before the days of Sodexo, Mines' dining service was provided by Aramark, and boy was the food awful. I lost weight during the three-week stint, and grew tired of the bland concoctions in the poorly lit room called Slate. Needless to say, I was excited to spend what few money I had on junk food. And I had the common decency to not wear pajamas to the Safeway down the road.

July 17, 2010  Tonight's schedule (proudly brought to you by the school of mines)....Finish Chemistry Lab report (4-8pgs), study for tomorrows exams, take a shower, and sleep. If I have enough time, that is.

I complained on Facebook a bit. But looking back, I had no idea what a true late night finishing reports and homework would be like. 

July 18, 2010 Hey I might have gotten an F on computer science! Woo!!! That's like, 50%!!! Yeah!!On a more serious note, NO MORE HOMEWORK NO MORE EXAMS! Just research.

I actually did well. 

July 20, 2010 Just got back from project meeting interviews...SUMMET could totally be made into a reality TV show.

Yes. The stress definitely got to some of us, and living with people we didn't know had its challenges as well. There was also a winner at the end of the program for those who got the best grades. 

July 21, 2010 Starbucks dark chocolate mocha bottled frappaccino + Milky Way dark midnight = e

I should have capitalized the E. But I was learning quickly. 

July 21, 2010  My Panda Express fortune cookie: "Your sense of humor will see you through difficult times".

Ha. Haha. 

July 23, 2010  WOOOO!!!! Presentations are DONE!!!! The hard part of Nerdland is DONE!!!!!! YAY!!!! I'm FREEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!

Oh, kid. That was the tip of the iceberg. (But props on aptly naming CSM "Nerdland").

It was a great experience. At the end of it all, I wrote this note in reflection. I was so wrong. I would eat breakfast at Slate again (man, I miss those hashbrowns), two summers later I would eat lunch while the sports camp kids yelled when I would be an RA for Challenge, I would most certainly sleep in the dorms again, although that was my last night in Randall Hall, I would get up at an insane hour in the morning, and I absolutely would push the handicap button to open those doors to the Student Center.

We Worked Our Butts Off. Was It Worth It? Yes.

Saturday, July 24, 2010 at 5:11pm
Today was the end of SUMMET and other things. Yesterday was the last of many things.
Yesterday was the last time I ate breakfast at the cafeteria at Mines. I probably won't be getting up at 6:30 ever again to eat that junk, so it was a last.
After that was the last time we would do anything hard at SUMMET, then we were free after our presentation (fistpumpz!). 
Then was the last time we ate at the cafeteria for lunch. The last time we would hear those little brats buzzing and yelling. The last time we would eat pizza cause it's the only acceptable thing.
Our last fun activity together was Eliche's. It was also the last time our lives would be in danger because of Gerame in the driver's seat. The last time we would have to squeeze into those vans- all twenty-something of us. 
That night, it was the last night I would sleep in the dorms. It was the last morning our alarm clocks would go off at an insane hour in the morning. 
Today after waking up, it was the end of saying "good mornin'" even if it wasn't. It was the end of taking your toothbrush and tooth paste to the bathroom and finding a sink to brush them in. 
We ate breakfast burritos: that was the end of all of us eating together.
We all began to pack. The dorms began to look empty. It was the end of hearing my fan humming constantly, Zofia sitting at her computer listening to music, and Brooke's poster of Justin Bieber on our wall. 
We ended our tearful and humorous farewells with Rosana and Marchana, while smiling because Greg had already left.
Graduation was the end of everything SUMMET, it was also the last time I would get to push the handicap button for the doors to open to the Slate building. 
We took pictures, then gave farewell hugs. 
We then walked back to the car that brought us here. 
It was the end of a month together.
But yes, it was worth it.
THE END 

There definitely were things that were unique to that summer though. Such is time, life, and experiences. Lines have slopes, sometimes intersect, sometimes are parallel. Experiences make up our lives, but I think you can't have the experience twice. It'd be like trying to draw the same line over the piece of paper but never seeing it show up.

I had climbed a slope in what would become a mountain, and did it with some pretty cool people.

***
 I found out in the Linux Lab while coding in MatLab, ironically (the program I would be using to analyze data this summer).

Dear Katerina,
Congratulations! You have been accepted into the 2013 CMMAP Summer Internship Program....

I was given a week to make a decision, and was waiting from responses from other internships as well.

There are some decisions, or paths that we will take, that will affect our course long-term, possibly for the rest of our lives. I was (am?) afraid that this was going to be one of them, and wasn't sure what to do: wait for another opportunity, or accept the one in front of me. But one of my professors said something along the likes of, "It doesn't end up that way when you look back at it in the end."

I accepted the research position at CMMAP through Colorado State Univeristy. Many of my geophysics friends will end up scattered in many different fields such as oil, seimology, hydrogeophysics, geothermal energy, and others. And here I am, a geophysicist among mostly atmospheric scientists, 13 other interns beside myself. 

I suppose I was somewhat prepared for spending a summer writing MatLab scripts, yet it is still my first taste of "real life". I have an office I'm supposed to sit at for eight hours a day, and I get paid for it. It's pretty great. And when I get home, I don't have to do homework, which leads to slightly more delicious meals than I have during the school year.

The second stage of life, as I discovered Fall 2012 semester, is when you are faced with such hard times that you go through a box of Swiss Cake Rolls per week. The third stage of life is when you can buy Swiss Cake Rolls, but you buy salad instead.

That is now- organic leaf mix with creamy Caesar dressing. I'll bike to work in the morning, just as I have every morning. It's weird, this pretending to be healthy thing. The bike ride is killer. It's only four miles one way, but the last hill to reach the atmospheric science building is so steep, you'd think you'd start rolling backwards. It's too slopey.

Don't tell MatLab, but time isn't a finite vector we can open up on the computer and check out what happens. Back in 2010 I didn't know where I would end up, and I have no idea where I'll be in another three years, in 2016. Perhaps in the future I will discover that this summer experience will parallel experiences yet to happen. Maybe it won't.

But I won't know everything until the end of time.

Correlation

Some unrelated Java code...

I enter Green Center at 9am for Geophysics EPICS, our project-based data analysis class. It's a fun class, probably my favorite. We're on our second to last project. The stress of the week has weighed on me. I'm feeling the tension of stuff not getting done.

But yet, the time in the Linux Lab flies. Time flies when you're having fun. Using MATLAB, I throw some plots together. It's a soothing process, once you get past the craziness of the impending deadline of Friday.

After three more hours of class, lunch with SWE, I head back up to the lab. Finally, at 2pm, I exit the lab to go to my other classes. It's a beautiful day, dang it. I wish I could be outside chilling, or having a catch. Not spending it inside the dark abyss of Green Center.

After classes are over, I head back to the Green Center. Anxious and unfocused, I decide to buy a grape Nos energy drink. I focus and make more plots, trying to find a correlation between weather patterns and avalanche occurrences.

It's enjoyable. I can imagine working a job like this. In fact, I'm excited for the research internship at CSU I accepted: my project apparently will be "mapping the global persistence of tropospheric winds and the impact of these winds on large scale climate/circulation patterns". Kind of similar to the stuff we're doing in EPICS. It seems cool.

I like the exploration of data, trying to find patterns. At the beginning of the class, I had no idea what I was doing and made plots pretending I knew. As it goes on, I still don't know what I'm doing, but I know how to pretend better and use the tools better. It's like life. You really have no idea what you're doing, just winging it as you go along, learning more and more stuff.

Yep, it is like life. Sometimes it feels like a mess.

Sometimes things go wrong.

{badness 10000}
It's over 9000.

"MATLAB is exiting because of fatal error."
"killed" 
bahahaha

And at the end of the day, all we can do is leave a report, or lab log of what we've done.

Geophysics, Heck Yeah

Volunteering to recruit future geophysics majors!

Nearing the end of my third semester, I'm finally getting out of the bulk of core classes everyone has to take here. Gone are the days of building water filters for freshman EPICS design, Chem lab, writing environmental ethics papers, and soon Econ Portal. Next semester I'll be in Human Systems (a social studies class which will be my "fun" class), but the rest of my classes pertain to my major- Theory of Fields I: Static Fields, EPICS II for Geophysics, and Java. I'll be in Differential Equations of course, and I'll be working towards my minor as I take Linear Algebra. What an adventure it will be indeed.

It's been great fun in Introduction to Geophysics this semester. I've gotten to see all the different possibilities of applications for Geophysics: oil/gas, mining,  water, geothermal, agriculture, geohazards like earthquakes, volcanoes, and landslides, and so much more. I don't know what I want to do with  my degree yet, but I'm sure finding out will be awesome. Geohazards fascinate me right now (except landslides).

Another great aspect of Intro has been meeting more of the cool people in my major. I know a few from freshman year (and we all walk together from Intro to Geology and sit in the front row, heh), but the kids I've  met this year confirm my theory that geophysicists are the coolest and happiest people on campus. Us 30 (yep, 30 even) Class of 2015'ers are gonna learn a lot and have a lot of fun in the coming semesters.

I volunteered the other weekend to represent the Geophysics department at Preview Mines, an event for prospective students. It's funny because just two years ago I applied as a Physics major to Mines, but changed my mind after the department tour. The students that were sophomores then are now seniors. Scary. But it was cool, I got to talk about why I chose Geophysics and why I love it here.

Honestly, it's the people. Like I said, my classmates are cool, upperclassmen are really awesome offering advice and making you feel welcome, and the professors are super helpful. Everyone makes everyone feel at home. That's probably the secret as to why geophysicists, the few, the unknown, the awesome, are one of the happiest majors at Mines. Doing what you love working with great people.

Now if Green Center could grow a few windows...I'd be even more stoked about spending three years there.