We're moving!

Hello followers (particularly my Mom)

I've decided to move my writing over to a new location on Medium. It's less clunky for me and I think the streamlined approach to the new site will encourage me to write more and often.

I'll be using my internet "nom de plume", Irene Italia.

I hope you enjoy my new home, happy reading.

Biological Rules: breaking them because I'm a rebel, or, a rant on why Bergmann's "Rule" makes me twitch

I love rules. That is to say, I hate them, which is why I love to break them.

There are a slew of biological "rules" that people such as myself love to hate. I put rules in parentheses because, in reality, a lot of these patterns we observe in nature have so many exceptions that I am reluctant to use that word. But for the sake of argument and typing, I'll go ahead and use it here.

My favorite among these is something called Bergmann's Rule. The rule originally stated that species within a genera tend to exhibit an inverse relationship between body size and climatic temperature. Said anther way, big things are found in cold places, small things are found in hot places.

But first. Why do we care? I'll tell you. It turns out that body size places physical constraints on a lot of ecological and physiological properties of organisms. Since I study mammals, that's what we'll focus on here. Gestation time, body size predicts that. Digestive tract length. Home range size. Metabolism. Trophic interactions. All related to body size. Body size can also be estimated from fossil material, allowing us to go back in time and interpolate all sorts of cool stuff about animals we can't observe, which is something I like to do. SO. Asking what controls or influences body size is one of those "big questions" in biology. Which brings us to Bergmann's Rule.

Okay. We're comparing species within a genera across a temperature gradient. Easy.

NOT SO FAST!

This rule has problems from the get go, before we can even start critically analyzing it. It turns out that most studies examining Bergmann's Rule use latitude as a proxy for temperature. I'm not really sure why. Maybe it's because taking a thermometer outside is unreasonably difficult. Maybe it's because we don't really know what we mean by "temperature". Is it average annual temperature, minimum seasonal temperature, something else? Latitude is correlated with a bunch of these temperature variables, so maybe we're good? Close enough? Okay, again for the sake of argument, sure. Moving on.

It turns out, however, that most studies have taken the original concept of comparing species within a genus and instead compare populations of individuals within the range of a species. So before I've even started my critical analysis of this so called rule, all the data and studies that have been used to address it in the past fail to conform to the central tenets of the rule.

It's no small wonder, then, that every paper published on this dammed "rule" over the last few decades has come up with a different answer as to "how many things conform to Bergmann's Rule?" 30-50% of mammals? Unless you are an animal that burrows. Oh, and if you're a carnivore it's not such a great rule either.

This is problematic for a graduate student such as myself trying to understand "basic ecology". One of the things we strive for in science is consensus. The inability to reproduce what someone else has done because "we don't know how to define the problem" or because an analysis "lacks the statistical power to reject the null hypothesis" is, for lack of a better word, dumb.

Furthermore, why? Let's say, again for the sake of argument, that most mammals do follow the rule. Okay. What does that mean? This is perhaps my biggest problem with these rules: they have very little explanatory power. We spend all this time arguing over whether or not things follow a rule, and we don't even have a good reason for WHY it would happen in the first place. All sorts of things have been proposed: thermoregulation, productivity, competition. But, I have little faith in these explanation given that we 1. can't agree on what we're testing and 2. we can't come to a consensus on what we're observing.

Also, it happens that often the answer in biology ends up being "it depends, and it's a little of all of the above."

Not very satisfying.

And before you know it, a year has gone by

I've neglected my blog. It turns out, graduate school takes up a lot of time. Add on top of that, life. Also, all the links to photos seem to be broken... I'll get to fixing that some time in the next year. Ha.

Quick update: yes I'm still working on my PhD at UNM. No, I'm not almost done, I have about a year to go, putting me at about a 6 year duration. This is still somewhat flexible depending on what I want to do with regards to finishing or doing a predoctoral fellowship.

Major events: I'm presenting a talk at the annual meeting for the American Society of Mammalogists, during the plenary session. It comes with money and honors and all that good stuff. It's kind of a big deal.

The past year, while pretty awful regarding emotions and my personal life, has been really good to me professionally. I have a couple publications that should be coming out in the next 6 months or so (assuming other people stop dragging their feet) in high impact journals. I'll post links to the abstracts once they are available.

Right now what's on my plate is getting my ASM talk put together. The challenge is getting all the technical details in there while still making it accessible and interesting, and limited to about 15 minutes long. This is hard because the talk is pretty heavy on modeling and computering, and I'm talking about paleo stuff at a meeting dominated by people who work with still living animals. But they gave me an award, so I must be doing something right.

I will be giving a similar version of said talk at the annual Vert paleo meeting in Dallas. Which brings me to this lovely gem I came across while procrastinating on Facebook.
http://www.maryanningsrevenge.com/2015/04/things-we-hope-to-see-at-svp.html

That's all for now. Yes, I'm alive. And I'm going to make an effort to post once a week on this thing. And those posts will be more coherent and thoughtful than this.

...

Next time: Bergmann's Rule, what is it, and is it a thing, and if it is a thing what does it mean?

Megafauna and Ecosystem Function Conference in Oxford: My spring break and my first solo international travel, Part 1

It's been ages since I've updated my blog. There's a lot to catch up on, but today I'm just going to fill people in on my trip to St. John's College in Oxford a couple weeks ago for my first international conference. Mostly, this will be pictures for my mom to gawk at.

The meeting was a gathering of people who study large animals, mostly mammals, and the extinctions that happened at the end of the last ice age and beyond. In case you were unaware, there was an extinction across the globe that killed most large animals. In North America, something like 33 genera of mammals went extinct, most weighing over 50-kg. This no doubt had effects on ecosystems and surviving biological communities. The point of the conference was to discuss all these things, including the potential for reintroducing large animals back into environments (very controversial). I gave a talk on the impacts of the extinction on surviving carnivores in North America.

If you want to get an idea of what was going on with the talks, you can go on Twitter and search #oxmegafauna, the official hashtag for the meeting. There's also a website from the conference http://oxfordmegafauna.weebly.com/. For several reasons, my talk is not on the website. Primarily, all my work is unpublished, so I don't really want it out there too much, yet.

The first leg of my trip began in London, where I did some sight seeing before I took the train to the actual conference.

Big Ben, London, UK

Double Decker Bus, London, UK

The River Thames, London, UK

The Big Eye and Lights, London, UK

Camden Lock for some quick shopping, London, UK

I found Heisenberg in Camden! Do you see him? Tip of the hat to the 505

Extinct Giant Ground Sloth claws, skin, and poop! Natural History Museum, London, UK

Sloth Skeleton, London, UK

Me and the sloth

Paying homage to Charles Darwin

The great hall at the Natural History Museum, London, UK

Paying homage to Mary Anning, one of the most important people in paleontology. This is a Plesiosaur, an extinct marine reptile. London, UK

Another extinct sloth!

The Natural History Museum of London is a beautiful building

It's been a rough semester

Rather than spend an entire post complaining, again, about the difficulties I've been having at school I'll just give a quick update.

Yeah, I'm still pursuing my degree. I started out this past semester with some pretty lofty goals: submit one of my master's chapters to a journal, finish my first analysis of my first dissertation project, submit my dissertation proposal to the department. What ended up happening was that I started reanalyzing my master's data and coming up with new ways to deal with it. Then I go caught up with teaching and grading. Then I got caught up with trying to get the dissertation project going and I haven't touched the master's work for months. In short, everything has been started, but nothing is done.

The one thing I did mange to do in the past week was submit an abstract to a conference where I will be presenting my Chapter 1 work. That conference isn't until March, which seems like a lot of time but it isn't. The past 4 months have taught me that everything I want to do is going to take at least twice as long as I plan. So, having said that, here is the game plan for the next semester:

Over winter break, write a first draft for a departmental grant, and get the modern museum data for my chapter 1 project.
First two weeks of school, grant done for the department.
End of January, have a first analysis completely done of the chapter 1 data.
End of February, finished analysis of chapter 1.

This list can't be changed, which means anything else without hard deadlines will have to be flexible. It's amazing how little things here and there can chip away at what seems like limitless time. I'm supposed to be the teaching assistant for a different course than I normally teach, which will likely have significantly less grading than has been expected of me before. My adviser is also the instructor, so we'll see what her expectations are.

I think I have to make something perfectly clear to everyone, including myself. I am in graduate school primarily to graduate, and everything else in my graduate school life that doesn't move me in the direction of graduating is not my primary concern at this point. I need money to survive, and teaching is a means to an end. Things that cause me stress and make me miserable don't need to be a part of my life, either. I need food, shelter, exercise, a social life that balances out my work, and to graduate. That's it.

It's been a very rough semester.

The "Uncle Rico"s of Graduate School: I Don't Care Where You Went to College

In the movie "Napoleon Dynamite" there is a particularly pathetic character: Napoleon's uncle, Rico. He's kind of a sad dude for a variety of reasons, but what really sticks out in my mind is that he is a full grown adult that bases his entire self worth on the accomplishments and dreams he had decades earlier, in high school. He's sad because on the exterior he seems very confident, but you know that deep down he is barely hanging onto his sanity and security of self. 

After having been in graduate school for a number of years I find it very surprising when I run into an "Uncle Rico". The people who act like anyone gives a damn where they managed to get into college when they were in high school. The kind of people who at the drop of a hat will brag about where they went, how prestigious, exclusive, etc. etc. barf barf etc. it was. Maybe that was impressive then, but it isn't now.

Don't get me wrong. I went to a decent college, and I'm proud of what I feel culminated in an excellent education. My education was a means to an end. I consider my undergrad a piece of trivia of my life, and it only comes up if it is relevant to conversation or if someone explicitly asks, for the following reasons...

Where you went to school has little to no bearing on your quality as a graduate student/researcher/whatever

Where I went for undergrad was a reflection of where I was as a person at age 17. I don't know about anyone else, but I wasn't a fully developed human being when I was 17, when I barely squeaked my way into a university. I was NOT a good student in high school, not good enough to go to the schools I wanted to. I wasn't even a fully developed human being when I LEFT college. 

If you've found yourself in graduate school and are still bragging about something you did a decade ago, open your myopic little eyes and take a look at the people around you. Chances are they come from all different walks of life and found their way to the present on their own unique path. You probably have people around you that went to an ivy league, or a small private college, or a public university. You might even find someone who got a later start, worked, and maybe even went to community college for a while. My point, and the good news, is that these are all equally valid ways of navigating academic life. If graduate school has taught me anything it's that there is no "right" way.

Very Few People Care

By the time you're in graduate school, your undergrad is almost nearly irrelevant. The only people that care are as follows:

You

Your parents or immediate family

-- Its ok if other people brag about your past accomplishments, but doing it yourself is sad (see Uncle Rico).

Other alumni if you bump into them

-- Bro-like hand slapping and "We Are!"s when I bump into a former school mate are guilty pleasures. Then I calm myself and return to reality.

Those annoying bastards that call looking for money from your alma mater

-- Please. Stop. Calling. Me. When I finally manage to make piles of cash to donate, I'll call you.

Your CV/Resume

-- Not really a person, but you get the idea. Older and lesser accomplishments are inappropriate on this document, anyway, even if your basic education information stays on it. That's not my rule, that's common knowledge.

If someone asks where you went to school, it's just polite small talk. And unless you're talking to an old friend that you haven't seen in YEARS, you would be better served to talk about more recent things.

No one likes a bragger

Nuff said, and it's a transparent facade.

The Cost of Research

I've been kind of in the research doldrums. Right before I went to CT I got a lot of bad news regarding research funding. This isn't uncommon, most research proposals, even good ones, don't get funded right away. I'm not going to starve to death or anything like that, I have a TA stipend to live off of for the next two years. The issue is finding money to pay for the research that will ultimately get me my degree. There's costs with travel, lab samples, overhead costs for the university... it kind of goes on and on.

While I've been working to find research money for 3 out of the four projects I want to do, I have been working on a project that doesn't require any money what-so-ever. It's a computer modeling project that uses databases, which are free. I also have access to geographic information systems software at school, which is also something I don't have to pay for. I'm thinking this project is going to take about a year to finalize.

Once the fall semester starts again, I'll get back into grant writing mode, try again with some other agencies, and cross my fingers that the funding gods decide to grace me with some good luck. In the mean time I've been seeking out alternative ways to jump start my research. A friend recently tried out a website for personal donations to fund some field research to look for thought-to-be-extinct Costa Rican frogs. As of today he's made about $200 of his $1200 goal, so it's a start. I decided to try making one for myself. I'm hoping I can get enough to travel to a few museums to get some preliminary data. Here's hoping!

And if this doesn't work, perhaps some bake sales will bring in some much needed revenue...

Post Written Exams

Hello friends, I'll be recounting the last couple of months from the comfort of my mother's couch in CT.

Don't worry. I didn't drop out of graduate school, I'm just taking a short holiday now that the semester is officially over.

I guess the big event since my last entry would be my comprehensive exams, which was quite the adventure. Part of what made it so "exciting" was that I made the decision to have an extra person on my committee, even though by guidelines it wasn't necessary. I only needed 3 people, but I opted for 4. Personally, it felt necessary. Comps are viewed by many as a hoop that needs to be navigated to get on with the PhD process, and that just seems pointless to me. They were going to make me do this anyway, so I decided to get as much out of it as possible and poke the brains of as many smart people as I could. Now that it's all over, I feel like I have a much wider base of knowledge, and that I set a precedent for what my expectations are for myself and the people I work with.

Originally I was scheduled to have the big day on April 25th. Then, my committee had some scheduling issues and the date was in limbo before we landed on May 2nd as the only available day everyone could get together for a 3 hour block of time. I was really upset about the change. It was the lowest part of of the ordeal for me, especially since this news came during my second set of written questions. I was livid that they were putting my through that stress during a time where I should have been concentrating only on my exam response. Eventually, however, I accepted it as just another inevitable thing and got over it. Part of the issue was having a larger committee than usual.

In the end I passed, with distinction. Phew. It actually wasn't so bad in retrospect. The hardest thing was not really knowing what they were going to test me on. I had people from three disciplines who were going to be testing me, which leaves a lot of fair game. In the end I taught myself population and community ecology, and read as many papers as I could find that were relevant to my research. I had made a short talk to give at the beginning, but we ended up spending two hours going through each slide, and they completely directed the conversation.

I learned some important things during the process, unrelated to my actually dissertation.
1. If not given guidelines on the length to a written response to a question I will produce 12 pages, on average, not including references.
2. Faculty are far less intimidating if you treat them like colleagues.
3. Scheduling meetings that include more than 3 people is a lot like herding cats.
4. When you are the focus of a discussion, be in control.
5. Nothing is so important that you should make yourself psychologically or physically ill over it.

I've actually been aware of that last point for a while, seeing as how I've been doing the whole grad school thing for many years now. During my exam preparation, I didn't isolate myself or go into seclusion. I decided from the beginning that I was allowed to have a life. That's my attitude toward grad school and life in general, and it kept me sane during comps. I didn't give up weekly hang-outs with my friends, game nights, etc. Studying and planning my PhD research became my job for a couple months, and I treated it different from the rest of my life. No job is worth being miserable over.

I came out of comps as a well defined PhD candidate. I'm sure my research will change, given  unforeseen hurdles or funding issues, but I have direction at this point and can get this ball rolling finally.

It's Comin' On Comps

Hello my lovelies.

We're about 4 weeks into the spring semester of my third year (give or take, I lose track about 2 weeks in), and I've been focusing most of my attention on preparing for my comprehensive exams.

Comprehensive exams, or "Comps", is the gauntlet equivalent that determines if a PhD student advances to candidacy and stays in a PhD program. In my particular program it involves writing research proposals for a four chapter dissertation, an extended period of time where faculty on an academic committee ask written exam questions, and culminates in a face-to-face oral exam with the entire committee. The exam material is basically anything they feel I should know, and they will ask me questions until I can't answer them anymore.

I'm kind of looking forward to this in some ways. I kind of want to know what I know, and know what I don't know. I'll also be showing off my biology knowledge to my non-biology committee members, and showing of my geology knowledge to the biology folks. On the other hand, however, they can ask me anything. And I don't really know what to expect from some people.

The written part of the exam has me less worried than the orals. They will very likely be open book questions. I already know that one of my committee members is going to give me 48 hours to do his part, and my adviser typically gives a week. The other two committee members are kind of wildcards for me. They are from different departments that do comps differently than the biology department, so they might throw me a curve ball.

The trick to passing the oral portion of the exam is not cracking too soon.

My oral exam is April 25th, and the 5 weeks before are set aside for my written exams. I start the week after spring break. Between now and then I'm trying to do as much reading as possible. This afternoon I turned in a draft of my proposals for my committee to look at.

So we'll see what happens over the next couple month.

Plans

"Plans are nothing, planning is everything" - Dwight D. Eisenhower

Plans certainly can change. I recently returned from my winter break, during which I did as little work as I could manage. I spent yesterday cleaning my kitchen, and will be tackling the rest of my apartment, room by room, over the next week or so. I came into work today to clean my desk and get my thoughts organized for school, which starts next week.

There exists a file on my computer that is rather vulgarly titled "Sh*t Melissa needs to f@#king get done.docx", which is a list of things I need to do, divided up by months. This was my feeble attempt to get organized and give myself some direction last fall. I looked at the file today.

I did almost nothing that was on that list last semester.The things I did complete didn't happen during the allotted times, either. I remember being busy last fall, with most of my brain power going to writing a very large grant proposal. I didn't do "nothing", I just didn't do most of the stuff I initially set out to do.

Plans are pointless. They change. They are good intentions. There are things I absolutely need to do, but priorities shift around, and I'm finding that despite my best efforts, planning out work is an almost comical endeavor.

But I'm going to do it anyway. I can at least say that I tried.

Re-Blog

So I've been spending the past week working on a post for another blog I occasionally write and edit for. It's on my most recent field experience, and the link below will take you to the post on UNM's Biology Blog. Enjoy!

Exhuming Ancient Giants

Website

I've been working on a post for another blog on my recent fossil excavation, and I'll provide the link to that when it goes up. In the mean time, I thought I would share my academic website. Basically the idea is to have a resource with my academic and professional stuff. It's not done, and I could use some advice if people want to give it.

https://sites.google.com/site/melpardi/

Blue Screen of Death

I'll skip the apology about being absent for the past month.

Yesterday I returned to my desk and was greeted by a big blue screen with scary white writing on my computer. I have no idea what any of this gibberish meant, but nothing good ever comes from the blue screen of death.

I restarted my computer and everything seemed to be fine, I was even able to recover the one sentence I had written in a Word document I had been working on. I have no idea what caused this hiccup, but as far as I can tell everything seems normal. But it sure is scary to come back to your computer, one where you haven't saved any back-ups in a while, and see this:

I have the time to write this post mid-afternoon on a Tuesday because I am currently backing up everything on my computer onto an external hard drive. Yesterday, I backed up my operating system. I've been stupidly lax, even though I've had disasters happen in the past. Many years ago, I lost my entire undergraduate thesis (twice). Rebuilding research, after months of work, is absolutely heartbreaking. And nothing can induce a panic attack in a graduate student quite like the prospect of having months or years of work lost. Gone. In an instant.

So it might be over kill, but I now have weekly back-ups scheduled from now until the end of time.

Lofty and Ambitious Goals

Okay! Semester is off to a good start so far. I haven't been to all of my classes as of yet, and I'm not sure where my schedule is going to settle, but it looks promising. I'm still somewhat stuck in vacation mode, and it was really nice getting out of New Mexico for a couple weeks to visit family and friends before things got busy again. I was pretty desperate to see the ocean and sleep on a beach, and I was successful in checking that off my list of to-dos for the year. I came back from CT more tan than I ever get in NM, probably because I'm so paranoid about sunburns here that I slather myself in sunscreen pretty religiously.

Classes and work aside, I have some personal goals and things I'd like to see happen over the next couple months. I really want to get back into music, I really regret letting that part of me atrophy since college. Starting next week I'm going to schedule daily bass practice, at least 40 minutes a day. Given that I kind of putz around my apartment aimlessly every morning before getting myself out the door, I can easily reallocate this time to playing my electric. If I can commit myself to this successfully for a couple months, I'm going to sell my old upright that I left in CT and allow myself to buy a new one out here in NM. I've also acquired a contact for a voice instructor, and I'd love to take singing lessons and get back into singing somewhat seriously.

Exercise. I kind of became a gym rat over the summer, going for a couple hours roughly 5 times a week. I'd be happy exercising at least 3 times a week while the semester is going, because I turn into an antsy wreck if I sit around for too long at my desk. I'm not sure how I'm going to make this work, running and lifting during the day means I'm sweaty and gross for the remainder of the day, but going at night means I'm taking the bus in the dark, which is kind of sketchy. I might need to get a parking pass to make this doable.

And I am going to harass Russ until we get our papers written and done. There's no reason I shouldn't have at least 2 papers published from my master's research by the end of the spring.

COMMON!

Summer is gone... sigh

The new semester starts in 3 days, and I realize that I haven't posted in over a month. Part of the reason is that I found myself a little burnt out and discouraged. The other reason is that I have been taking a mental siesta during this time.

Let's just say the past few months haven't exactly gone according to plan. In my last post I was lamenting about how no matter how much time or effort I was putting into writing, it never reaches completion. A few weeks after writing that post my working group turned in the third(?) version of our review paper for my adviser to look over. Then we didn't hear anything for a few weeks. After making three figures, editing the crap out of the paper, and various people (including myself) leaving town, I more or less had moved on from this project. In my naivety I figured we were more or less done. Oh how wrong I was.

I strolled into my office the other day, my first day back at my desk for almost 3 weeks, and the first thing I see is our paper on my chair. Bleeding. It actually had more comments on it than the previous version. This isn't the end of the world, the figures aren't going to change and the edits are somewhat minor, but COMMON! I'm so over this.

Here's the thing. It's already a really well written paper, I have no problem saying that. Many of the edits are wordsmithing or tweaking, and I'm just not up for this. Granted, some of them are worth following up on, but others kind of change the meaning of what was originally written. And that drives me nuts. I've gone over all the comments, and Meghan and I are going to work on this some over the weekend or next week.Then maybe it'll be done? Maybe?

I also discovered another orphaned paper that somehow ended up on my desk: a non-dissertation related side project left over from a class last semester. I contacted the people involved with it yesterday to see if we could resurrect it and get it done, but so far I have heard nothing. I've decided I'm not even going to worry about it, it's not going anywhere as far as I'm concerned, and I can come back to it whenever. I just don't want to see it never come to completion, especially since so many man hours have already gone into it.

Since I'm not made of time or energy, I'm going to have to start forcing myself to not work so much on side projects. They have their place, but right now I have dissertation proposals to write and comps to get ready for.

Asymptotes

"In analytic geometry, an asymptote of a curve is a line such that the distance between the curve and the line approaches zero as they tend to infinity." -Wikipedia

Figure 1. Time, effort, and perfection. You're never gonna get there.
http://joyfulpublicspeaking.blogspot.com/2011/02/effort-and-asymptote.html

That is, the curve never actually reaches the line. It just gets really, really, really close.


Such is the case with "finishing" an academic project. In my case the "curve" is the paper I've been working on, but really it could be anything academic. A thesis, a project, and experiment, etc. etc. Whatever. The "line" is the completion status of the thing I'm working on. And no matter how hard I work on it, no matter how much time I put into it, I will never ever reach completion. It simply won't happen.


For me, the hardest parts of writing a paper are the very beginning and the very end. The beginning is rough because I have a difficult time building up motivation and getting over the initial hump; but, once I start writing I see the progress being made and it comes easier. The end is even more painful to get through, however, and it is all because of this asymptotic approach to completion. The last 10% of a paper takes an absurd amount of time to get through.


I know perfectly well this paper will never be good enough for my own standards. I know that eventually I'm going to have to just let it go, because any more time invested in it will just give me diminishing returns (see Figure 1). It just eventually becomes more work than it is worth. And that is how you know when a project is "done", even if it technically isn't. 

Because it can't be. It's mathematically impossible. And there's no use driving yourself crazy over it.


But for me, for right now, I think I've yet to reach that critical point where I feel like I'm wasting my time. So I'm off to the crazy factory for a couple more days of staring blankly at my computer screen. 

I'll stop if I start to go cross-eyed.

Academic Flailing

This is a topic I've intended to write on for a while now: academic flailing. I'm bringing this up now because I've been trying to learn how to do something new all on my own and it's taken me months to only be half successful with nothing to really show for it yet.

What's been going on is I have been working on a paper with some friends/colleagues since December. We originally intended to have the paper written and submitted some time in February or March. If you check the time stamp on this post you'll note that I'm writing this in mid June. So we're a "little" off target, needless to say.

The paper is, broadly speaking, a review on niche modeling. Somehow or another it was determined that we should DO a species distribution model to make a figure illustrating some of the points we were making in the paper. The only problem is that no one in our group does this kind of modeling. And I ended up being the one to take on this task while writing and editing continued.

Cut to the punch line: it's been two months, I've sort of learned enough about what I'm doing to be dangerous, but the result thus far hasn't ended up being particularly useful. I'm stubborn as hell and I'm going to do this, but I'm getting frustrated and exhausted fighting with this thing day after day, week after week (month after month). It's been a very steep learning curve, trying to teach myself how to do this thing no one in my lab knows how to do. I would seek out the help of outside people, but I feel like I need a basic understanding before I can even begin to ask them intelligent questions.

And so I've been flailing.

Science is, often, directed flailing. You flail, and flail, and then flail some more. And then sometimes, maybe, you end up somewhere. It's a lot like me swimming. I can keep myself from drowning, and if I point myself in a particular direction I can get from point A to point B. But it isn't pretty to watch.

It's kind of a funny analogy, unless you're the one who's been trying to keep their head above water for an obscene amount of time. And I'm tired, damn it.

Back to Reality

I fully intended to blog about my vacation with my mom, but a lack of reliable internet sort of put a damper on that plan. It is also completely non-academic, and although I have posted about things other than graduate school on this blog, I don't want to make that too much of a habit.

I will say though, vacations are important for maintaining the sanity of a graduate student. We all need breaks, and anyone who tells you any different is a dirty filthy liar. Our trip to Arizona was one of the better vacations I've taken in a long time, and it was nice to finally see the Grand Canyon. It wouldn't be the kind of thing I'd want to do every year; but, sometimes just staring over something so vast and outside of yourself is what you need to bring everything else in reality back into perspective. It's the main reason I miss being close to an ocean, and why I want to see the Pacific some day.

Hance Rapids. Taken with my mobile, so forgive the lousy quality.

But now I'm back to reality. First, I'm going to do the cliche thing and comment on how I can't believe that it is June already. I'm completely unapologetic about this. Summer intercession is almost over, and come Monday there will once again be college students wandering about. This won't change my working environment much, though. Working in my office over the past few weeks has been incredibly boring. No one is around, and by that I mean I sit in my office for 8 hours by myself, only seeing other human beings when I leave to go to the bathroom or get food/coffee. The PiBBS space is a different world when classes aren't in session. Furthermore, I think a lot of other people are traveling, so it is extra dead.

Another dose of reality came recently when I finally got my rejection letter for a big grant I had applied for back in the fall. The big yellow envelope of depression showed up right before I was going to Arizona, so I put off reading its contents until I got back. I finally went over the reviewer comments the other day. I had myself mentally prepared to get ripped to shreds, but it actually wasn't that bad. I agreed with pretty much everything the reviewers had to say, and they will help me write a stronger proposal for the next go around. Three years of support is just too good to not try again. I didn't really expect to get it this time around, they only funded something like 80 proposals with this particular award.

The reviews I got were also mixed. One reviewer rated my entire application as "fair" and provided the most detailed comments and criticisms. The other two rated it as "good" and "excellent". Even I know that my application wasn't "excellent", so I'm going to just go ahead and average everything out and say that I did "good" on my first attempt. Which isn't too shabby. All three reviewers commented that the whole proposal was really well written. The primary complaints were that I didn't elaborate more on my methods and statistics and that I was vague about the broader impacts. It was only a 5 page proposal, so I'm going to have to really try to fit some of these details in and trim up other areas. I'll also have some publications by the time I try again, so that will also boost my application.

The complaints about my broader impacts section kind of threw me, however. Almost all funding agencies now require applicants to explain how they are going to make the world a better place with their research. Kind of like a Miss America pageant for scientists. I thought I had included enough in this section, but clearly not. Apparently they wanted to know how the specific project I was proposing would be relevant to my community (aka NM). I was more broad about how my activities as a scientist were beneficial to my community. Wrong! Looking back on it, I can easily make my project applicable to NM because it is on the role of large carnivores in communities. NM has a lot of issues with wolf populations and managing their larger carnivores, so this should have been a no brainer. But I wasn't sure what they wanted from me and I gave them the "wrong" thing. Next time I'll know better. These sections are becoming more important and less of a kiss-off, and now I know to put more into it.

The next month is going to be all about me tying up loose ends with projects, and thinking about my comprehensive exams. I'm thinking those will happen in the fall, but I'm kind of on the fence about it. We'll see.

First Publication

I got an email today from the editor of my book chapter, forwarded from Felisa (even though I'm first author), indicating that the electronic version of the book we contributed to is available online.

Paleoecology in an Era of Climate Change: How the Past Can Provide Insights Into the Future

Abstract:

Anthropogenic climate change is the most prominent conservation issue of our time. Expectations are that the Earth’s climate will warm ~2.5–6.5° within the next century. The accompanying biological consequences will no doubt be huge. How will the diversity of life on our planet respond to rapid climate change? The best way to predict the future may be to examine the past as biota have experienced numerous episodes of climate fluctuation throughout geologic time. Some of these climatic fluctuations, particularly those of the late Quaternary, have been as rapid as those anticipated by climate warming scenarios. Analysis of the paleontological record can yield valuable information on how past climate change has shaped biodiversity in the past, and provide clues for what we may expect in the future. 

Paleontology in Ecology and Conservation

Springer Earth System Sciences, 2012, 93-116, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-25038-5_6

This is very exciting, and it gave me a boost this morning. I was kind of dragging when I got in to work today. Good news is always nice, and I'm going to try to ride the momentum through the day.

The End?

I had a surreal moment yesterday afternoon. I suddenly became aware that the semester was ending, and I was caught off guard. It sounds dumb, but it hadn't actually registered in my head that the reason my big-ass class project was due this week was because we only have a week left of class, and then finals week is after, and then nothing. I recall a couple weeks ago being kind of annoyed because it felt like it was due "too soon" in the semester. No. It is due exactly when it should be.

I don't know if it's because I don't really have exams anymore, or I'm not teaching, but at the end of both this past fall and this spring I have had almost zero concept of time and the calendar. A week goes by, a month goes by, and it's all the same to me. I recall I was having anxiety over something back in February, and I felt like I been dealing with it for several weeks. Turns out I was way off, it had only been one week.

Maybe I'm impatient, and that is screwing with my concept of time. I'm simultaneously tired of waiting for certain things, and other things can take their sweet time for all I care. I've also been very distracted lately, which means I'm not really paying attention to many things around me, like time.

This hasn't had any permanent or detrimental consequences, yet, so I'm not worried.
I'm living in the moment, for now.