Reflections Post. No pun intended.

August 16th, 2010

Beatrice and I were talking during my goodbye dinner and she said she thought the project description she wrote was maybe overly ambitious. I personally feel like I could have accomplished a lot more with an extra two days or so of training picking horizons and faults before Beatrice left on vacation. That would have made my work during the two weeks she was gone more effective. This would have meant that upon her return we wouldn't have had to spend so much time repicking and after some preliminary corrections and looking at the surfaces could have moved on to coorelating faults. However, I don't think there's any way we could have loaded the data any faster than we did, especially because of the different technical difficulties we encountered. I do wish I had gotten further but realistically I think we did things as fast as we could and handled the problems that arose in as timely a manner as possible.
I think what I did achieve was a result of being honestly interested in the results. I was excited to pick horizons because I really wanted to see how the faults were orientated and I was looking forward to beginning to coorelate those faults and then map the surfaces. When we did finally map the first surface it was really exciting to see what I had been picking in two dimensions become this three dimensional structure. I'm looking forward to finishing up the other four layers and drawing conclusions. I think part of my fascination was the variety in what I was learning. On the boat I learned about the equipment, the process of data acquisition, observed how serious and minor problems were solved, and at the same time overcame a lot of my shyness and felt like I really bonded with the group. Then when we returned to Memphis, I learned so much about faults and stratigraphy from Beatrice as we got excited about different formations in the data and tried to figure out what was going on. Learning about faults in an immediate application with true-life examples dirctly in front of me strongly affected my grasp of the possibilities. I also of course learned about importing data, became very familiar with ProMAX and SeisWork 2D. I had fun experimenting with the different settings and testing out some of the functions. Then working with Brian and Beatrice to determine what we were looking at gave me a chance to learn about well logs, electrical well logs, and how that type of characterization is done.
I think being on my own so much in an entirely unknown and “slightly” dangerous city also really shaped my summer in an entirely different way.
All in all I had an excellent time this summer. I think my experience was very reflective of what grad school will be like what with the group of students, the long work days, and the independence in decision making. I am still planning on going to grad school for sure, but although I had an excellent and nothing short of fascinating time working with reflection seismology I am still considering some other geophysics disciplines. One of the things that was very eye opening this summer was the several discussin that were had about proposal writing and finding grants. This was something I hadn't really heard about in detail at any point so it was great seeing some proposal research and writing in action.