...is the name of a really great track off of the Lord of the Rings: Return of the King soundtrack ;)

Hehe, anyway, my internship here in Arizona is wrapping up, as I leave at the awful time of 4:45 AM tomorrow morning to catch my plane back to the East Coast.  It certainly has been a great experience, but there are a couple things to do before I go.

I'll be posting abstract stuff in a separate post to follow this one.  I decided that I'll show all four iterations of the abstract, in the hopes that everyone else may do a bit better than I did their first time around ;)  Hehe, more it's to depict what is the more important information to include...and what is just unnecessary detail.  More on that to come, though.

The other thing I need to do is make sure I've covered all my goals for this summer, so here goes:

- Define your learning goals for the summer

    I'd like to know what it's like to participate in graduate level research and more about seismology since I'm looking at it as a potential career path.  I know that a lot of the work I'm going to be doing will be independently driven, so I'd like to see how I handle that kind of environment.

This was cur directly from one of my previous blog entries, so let's see how things turned out!

In talking and interacting with all the great people in the lab this summer, I'd definitely say I got a feel for what it's like to participate in research on the graduate level.  Sure, it's the summer and things are a bit more relaxed and all, but it's definitely a better sense of things than I had when I started out (which was dangerously close to nothing!).

Learned a lot about seismology and how research is done in the field, but perhaps more importantly I've found that I really like the work, and am very interested in learning more.  As a potential career path, then, seismoloy is definitely sitting high on the list.

As far as how I handled the more independently driven environment, in some ways I'm not sure I'm the best judge of how well this went.  I'm looking out on things from the inside, and from my biased point of view I'd say things turned out pretty well in the end, but others may have different opinions.  Still, I can say that I enjoy doing research and work in this manner.  There's one thing to add to this, though, that should probably be said.  Research is in no way isolation, as I learned quite well this summer.  It can be enjoyable in just how much socializing and interaction occurs amongst different members of the lab while working on different projects.  Sure, everyone has their own niche...but the lab lunch sessions and comments flying around amongst the computers can make all the difference between meaningful work and dull, dreary..boredom.

Let's hope my planes decide to cooperate with me tomorrow!

-Jamie