Goals and Day One

June 15th, 2010

So I know I'm a little late getting this on here, as I started working today, but access to the internet was very sketchy for the past week, and the internet access was just fixed in my house today.  After orientation week I had a week off.  My parents flew out to LA and met me there, and we took a mini family vacation around the area.  Saturday they dropped me off at my new home for the summer.  Today was my first day of actual intern work.  My advisor thought it would be good for me to see how they remove seismic stations.  I went with two grad students, Corrie and Kayla, to the California/Mexico border to remove five seismic stations.  They set them up a little differently than we did during orientation, so it was good to see.  It was HOT though.  105 in the desert is not easily done without a ton of water.  And I drank a ton.  Tomorrow I actually start what was originally scheduled for me to be doing, which is working in the computer lab mostly (at least I think).  I did get to meet Elizabeth though, and she seems really nice.  Whoa.  As I was writing this, there was an earthquake.  Pretty sweet.  It was little, but still, enough that we could feel it.  The best part is that all my housemates immediately went online to see where it came from.  It's pretty sweet living with earth scientists.  Ok, back to business...my goals.  Here goes:

1. To learn more about Matlab and Unix.  I knew nothing about these programs before orientation week, and I'll be using them quite a bit from what I can gather in the outline.  Matlab is what I especially want to focus on, as I can see many practical applications for it.  Unix...well, right now we're not getting along.  Hopefully we can find a common ground throughout this internship.

2. To be able to identify tremor and earthquakes.  I have no idea how to pick out tremor, and before orientation week, I had never really picked out earthquakes either.  Considering I'm going to have to do this, I think it's pretty important.

3. Get over my homesickness.  I've been away from home before, it's just more the people from home I miss.   Moving to college wasn't as bad because I had other people going through the same things as me.  Here it's just me, with links to all the other interns only through blogs.  Ten more weeks seems like an endlessly long time, so I'm hoping work will keep me busy and I'll get to see everyone I miss again before I know it. 

4. I was going to put feel an earthquake, but now that's kind of been accomplished.  I figured I should just put it on here anyway since it was one of my goals.

5. Learn more about seismology and geophysics in general.  I haven't taken any previous courses in either, but have always been interested.  I'm hoping this summer will inform me whether or not I'd be interested in doing this in grad school.

6. Learn more about analyzing earthquakes and tremor together.  One of the goals in the outline of my internship was to analyze earthquakes and tremor for spatial and temporal patterns.  Learning to do this may be the most challenging goal I have.  Hopefully I can accomplish it.

That's all the goals for now.  I'm sure I'll add more daily, so these won't be the only ones, but they're a start.