Summer (and a bit of fall)

Contrary to what activity in this blog may suggest, I did survive the summer, relatively intact. I did lose a bit of blood to the several hundred mosquitoes I came into contact with, but other than that I made it. (And no, that number is not an exaggeration. At one point I had 107 bites on my arms and legs. Neck was not included in the total but I'm sure would have added a good 20 more to the count.)

Lab work at the beginning of the summer went well. I completed data collection for the Lombard experiment, began data collection on a second in-lab experiment (which turned out to be more time consuming than previously estimated), and then headed off into the field. Kind of. I was foiled by weather for a good two weeks, and spent the beginning of June sitting in lab hoping the temperature might breach 70 during the day and/or that it might rain. The rest of June and beginning of July was much more "frog friendly." I drove north, south, west, and kind of east, battled mosquitoes and ticks, was freaked out by the glowing eyes of (mostly) harmless deer, listened to raccoons amble by my tent at night, walked across and down part of the Mississippi river, and learned that I never want to live in a tiny rural town, ever. Oh, and I did research.

My goal was to find ponds where my frogs lived, and then collect data related to the frogs and vegetation in the pond, but due to the cool dry start to summer, I mostly only accomplished the pond finding mission, along with some trial runs for data collection. But, now I know where to go, and I have a pretty good idea of how to do things next year.

The rest of the summer (July and August) was spent in lab, staring at sound analysis programs, MS Excel, and various statistical programs. A combination of extreme monotony (sound analysis), confusion and frustration (statistical programs), punctuated by tiny moments of success (nice graphs and coding things correctly in stats programs).

Now school has started back up again and I am forced to drag myself out of bed at 7am three days a week so I can learn more statistics. Two statistics courses (eep), journal club, a couple seminars, proposal writing, plus the usual data analysis and writing of manuscripts occupy my time lately. And tomorrow I start up another experiment. Thus begins Year Two.

Still alive

I did indeed survive my first day of grad school, no worries. The long silence is a result of statistics homework that takes eight hours to complete (!!), a paper due the second week of school, a ridiculous number of BBQ's (what do grad students do in winter when they cannot BBQ??), data analysis and battles with quirky software, and me squeezing in sleep where I can. Welcome to grad school Emily!

I'm enjoying it though - I think I'm happiest when I'm busy. (This does have a limit, however. If you plot busyness on the x-axis of a graph and happiness on the y-axis, it would probably look like a Normal bell curve. If I get too busy and insane, it's all downhill from there. (Look, applied statistics knowledge! The course is useful!))

Data analysis is plodding along. It's slow and rather tedious but it's getting there. Ten tests down, only forty more to analyze. I'm also in the planning stages of an experiment for this winter, in conjunction with another student in my cohort.

Looking at my schedule before school started, it seemed like I would have a lot of free time. Then school started and suddenly there were all these weekly meetings I need to attend. My weekly calender has a lot less white space now. And while the white space may technically be "free", I don't feel very free. My stack of articles and books to read is growing quite rapidly. Most of it is interesting material, but it's just a LOT of material to read and digest and remember. Quite a bit of it has to do with sound as well, and I've never really worked with hardcore sound stuff before, so I'm trying to figure that out in addition to reading the behavioral stuff. Since I haven't yet fulfilled my physics prerequisite, my advisor suggested an independent study on the physics of sound. I'm really hoping we can do that next semester so that I don't feel quite so befuddled about what's going on physically in the experiments I'm reading about.