Oh to be a Grad student

First of all the Memorial Earth Science department is big. And not just even big versus my wee class in St Andrews. It's the biggest in Canada. We have 30 faculty, 150 undergrads, 90 postgrads. The building is 7 floors tall. We get more research money than the whole of the rest of the Science Faculty. It's a well respected research facility. I didn't realise the magnitude of the place until I got here.

Somehow though they've managed to retain the closeness that I loved in St Andrews. All of the girls in the office know my name, which will come in handy as I've realised that they are the most important people in the department (they allow me access to the Stationary Room!). The grad students normally hang out and have lunch together in the staff room. The Alexander Murray Club (i.e. their Geolsoc) have events every 2 weeks and already they've discovered I'm awesome at Beer Pong.

The department is also nice and shiny. The building is all modern. All the instrumentation is lovely and hi-tech. We are the envy of most departments. We even have space for vending machines Georgie! This is going to be a nice place to be for 2 years.

The Alexander Murray Building. See how shiny it is!

Master's degrees here are viewed like jobs. You come into work at least from 9 til 5. You are expected to be productive once you get here. Your supervisor expects a lot from you. After all they are paying for you to be there. 

So what does my day to day life entail? Well so far not much...Well I have class twice a week. It's taught by my supervisor and there's 4 of us, 3 of which are his students. We discuss papers we have been given to read which would usually take about 40 minutes, but we normally run over because my supervisor likes to talk and tangents often occur. But less bad things said about him, he's also Head of the department.

I also have to work as a TA (teaching assistant). Having lots of experience doing this in St Andrews I thought this would be fine and a lot of fun. Well it would be, if I was familiar with the work they were doing.. .One of the guys joked on the GSA trip when I told him my concerns with differences in the syllabuses "I can imagine the kids saying to you, 'God Stacy, you don't know what Minasgerasite is?'" I would love it if they would ask me that actually. I'm having to help them with in depth crystallography which is boring and unnecessary in most people's opinions. And I know nothing about it. I cannot wait until 3 weeks time when they actually get given a mineral to look at.

The silly stuff they want the undergrads to do and the text book I now have to learn for no reason.

Other than that I chill in my office. I'm currently on the 6th floor which is the soft-rock floor i.e. not where I belong! I have to wait until some PhDs move out downstairs so I can be on the hard-rock floor with people who do my type of research. But at least at the moment I can hide from my supervisor because he is not coming up the stairs to come find me. But the novelty of an office is great. I have my own space, I can leave stuff here, I have a kettle for a constant supply of tea. I've got it sorted.

My little office space. There's 2 other desks but at the moment I'm all on my lonesome. I'll pimp up my pin board more when I'm in my proper office.

Where the tea is made.

But Stacy, don't you have research to be doing? Well yes, I do. But I don't have my rocks yet. I am lucky enough that I can go out to the Mojave Desert, CA to collect them in December (Note, the winter as it is the desert.) So that's where the fun starts. Well, where the fun ends really because once I've got them back I've got like a year of excruciating lab work to do to get my data. So please don't be jealous of my jet setting and lack of busy schedule. I'll get my comeuppance. 

And I am actually quite busy. This week I've got a 2-day field safety course to attend and then I'm off on another field trip over the weekend to Grand Falls (Central Newfoundland) just to go see some more rocks and see a bit of the island. It's not all fun and games you know.

My current view from my office across campus. Signal Hill is on the right behind the green building.

We got more bounce in California

"Wow, you're living the true Grad student life!" replies Michelle the academic advisor when I tell her I'm away to a conference within a week of me being here.

"Oh you're gonna get burned aren't you?" she replies when I tell her I'm a pasty English girl off to the Sierra Nevada for a week.

I felt really lucky to be going on this conference. It was a case of the right topic coming up at the right time. The GSA (Geological Society of America) have been running Field Forums for a while now, and they're basically a conference in the field where you review all the new data, look at the rocks, learn about current geological problems (and drink beer as you do at most Geology conferences). The people interested in the field apply and you get accepted onto the trip.

This year it happened to be, essentially, about granites in California, which was great as my MSc. thesis is also on granites in California (southern CA but shush!). The guy running it has ties to St Andrews thanks to Jen Chambers and a few students who have gotten to work with him over the last few years, which worked in my favour. And my own supervisor was willing to pay for it all, including flights. A sequence of good coincidences.

So I flew out to San Francisco from St John's, via Toronto, and after a brief encounter with US Customs about not having an ESTA, I made it onto Yankee soil. I navigated my way to the hotel, and then into Downtown San Francisco for a spot of sightseeing before I left for the conference the following day. My first impressions of San Francisco? That it was wonderful. I loved it all. Walking from the BART station through the city, wondering at all the skyscrapers, strolling through China Town, through the Italian District, towards Pier 39, I felt completely at ease. The weather was just hot enough for me to handle with a nice breeze to cool my white skin.

A rather tall skyscraper adorned with state and national patriotism.

From Pier 39 with Alcatraz in the background, holding my Dad's army flag that is travelling the world, starting from Mt Everest.

The seals that Loudon ordered me to go see, and quite rightly too.

A Wipeout Burger from the Wipeout Bar & Grill. It was amazing, even if it did raise my cholesterol a bit too much.

 The following day we were all meeting at San Fran Airport in groups to be transported to Oakhurst, CA where we were based for the first few days of the conference. At first I was worried that I wouldn't be able to find my group and I wouldn't get picked up and it would all go wrong. Thankfully the stereotypes about geologists came in handy. I found a bunch of people wearing walking boots/ socks and sandals, carrying poster tubes for the poster sessions, with the men all having facial hair.

We had plenty of time being the first bus out to stop and go for lunch, so myself, one of the tour conveners and experts in the area, an Italian, a Dutch ex-pat and a Californian hippie with pipe cleaners for hair bobbles, sat down for a proper Mexican. As my knowledge of Mexican food was no more extensive than the Old El Paso range, I got the break down of every meal, ordered a Burrito and was then told that this should be my yard-stick for good Mexican food. We were very lucky to find this restaurant.

Arriving at the hotel I was informed that I had been put into the hotel across the street, as there had not been enough room for all 56 of us in the Best Western. So it seemed that the grad students were in exile from the rest of the group across a very busy road. It was fine, our breakfasts were better by all accounts. My room mate for this trip was Claire, a small Scottish girl who had finished her PhD at Durham and was now a Post-Doc in Texas. Lumping the Brits together was a great idea in the end, as we got on really well.

Armed with the most impressive Field Guide anyone had ever seen we embarked on our first day, looking at the Guadelupe Intrusive Complex. A nice cross section through a suite of rocks was a good intro to the trip for everyone. I even felt knowledgeable at one point after we looked at some features that I had seen in Ardnamurchan. Who would have thought that I would travel X thousand miles to see the same stuff I had studied on a remote Scottish peninsula. And then one of the other Master's students had a poster on ring dykes. I felt like a proper geologist after that.

One of many panoramics I complied, this one across the low Sierras, where it was scorching hot.

Mingling of granitic and mafic melts, just like those in Ardnamurchan.

Beautiful crenulate margins of the enclave (I'll try not to include too many rock photos!)

Day 2 was rather boring rock wise, with not that many notes in my notebook and not that many pictures on my camera. The best part of the day was a group dinner trip to El Cid, a Mexican place in Oakhurst. With my new knowledge of Cal-Mex food I decided that it wasn't as good as my other meal, but it was good none the less and the beer was cheap. Conversation between the younger of us in the group turned to "What's the craziest thing that's happened to you on a field trip?" Stories of guns being pulled on groups were not uncommon, and I found out that University of Illinois students have a habit of getting themselves arrested. I then told them about Raisin Monday and I won for the embarrassment factor. The night ended with us going to the excellent drinking establishment, the Dirty Donkey. At $2.25 for a litre of beer you can't complain, and we didn't as we pretty much downed it so we could get back to the hotel for the evening's discussion. I would describe the place as a "dive" and the sort of creepy, low lit place you might imagine when thinking of an American bar. We told the hardy barmaid that we were at a conference, at which point she walked away. "Want to make this conference more interesting?" she said, handing over a pornographic DVD to Norbert, the only other first year Master's student on the trip.

The door of the legendary bar where we returned at the end of the week.

Entrance to Yosemite through Wawona Tunnel. Half Dome Peak seen in the background.

El Capitan. 900m from base to peak. One of the world's biggest challanges for rock climbers, who have been utilised for the mapping of the units along the various routes.

We stop for lunch and find a Momma and Baby bear in the trees.

Not a bad place to learn about the geochemistry of the Sentinel granodiorite.

After a few days in the low Sierras we headed to the cooler, higher climes of Yosemite. Everyone should go visit Yosemite. It is such a beautiful place, amazing views, variety of features from granite domes to waterfalls to forest. We met Greg Stock who is the Chief geologist of Yosemite, and surprisingly the only one in the park. That officially made him the coolest man in the world. Trained as a geomorphologist he works on the hazard and rockfall side of things in the park. The freezethaw and thermal expansion factors are really high in Yosemite and the numbers he was telling us from the experiments they've got going were pretty scary. He also told us how he uses a hi-resolution photography project to understand the rockfalls in the area, as well as helping to map faces of various granite domes. The website below is something to behold:

http://www.xrez.com/case-studies/national-parks/yosemite-extreme-panoramic-imaging-project/

I'll not go into any sort of detail about any of the rocks, so don't worry, please keep reading! Each day we had a different intrusive suite to look at, each of them posing similar geological questions. More and more data was fed to us at each stop from the leaders, and if we were lucky we actually managed to look at the rocks. From the Half Dome granite, to the Kuna Crest lobe, to the Cathedral Peak granodiorite, we dissected the Tuolumne intrusive suite, the most studied granite body in the world. We saw beautiful examples of granite, one of which was so white I blame it's albedo effect for the sunburn on my legs. Between it and the paleness of my white legs the light was just reflecting off the two. We also saw some impressive magmatic structures, which many of us had never seen before. Basically they preserve movement of magma, which you don't often see, and sometimes resemble stuff you see in sedimentary rocks. They were interesting enough to turn a structural geologist like Scott Paterson into a pluton lover.

Angular enclave vs chewed up rounded enclave.

Sorry Bower, you've been replaced for lone landscape shots.

Weird plume trail/ accumulation of K-feldspars.

MASSIVE crystals of K-spar where you can see the inclusions and oscillatory zoning.

Crazy enclave accumulation with cross-cutting granite veins.

Swirly trails of (apparently) a migrating magma tube, depicted nicely by the huge K-spars and the schlieren trails.

Me in front of the famous schlieren-bound-trough site, or the George Bergantz Memorial outcrop (N.B. George Bergantz isn't dead...)

Lovely view of the lakes in Sawmill Canyon.

Me at Obsidian Dome, seeing obsidian in the wild for the very first time.

The Thai restaurant where Wenrong takes all his visitors. He should get a commission. The place was excellent.

Most people had become so fed up of the older geologists bickering and not answering questions at the discussion the night of Day 4, that they had just skipped Day 5 and gone to the hot tub at the hotel in Mammoth. Thankfully Day 6 was a nice wind down day for us all, with less of the pedantic questions about CA-TIMS procedures at the outcrops, and more of the leaders presenting data for the whole of the arc. Honestly the chat could have been done inside, or even by us all reading the papers. But that wasn't the point of the Field Forum. Also if we had done that, we wouldn't have seen such incredible views.

Jade Lakes Loop. Here we talked about the host rocks of the plutons we'd been seeing.

Tioga Pass looking towards Mono Lake. Geochronology discussion where we got interrupted by a helicopter bringing in supplies for the roadworks.

Lake near Sawmill Canyon. Shear analysis by Scott where I made an intelligent interpretation of the tectonic regime.

Tenaya Lake where my burnt legs had a rejuvenating soak. And we talked about the all controversial emplacement dynamics of plutons.

 That night we had dinner and the majority of us young 'uns found it back to the Dirty Donkey to see away the trip with style. There was more of that $2.25 beer. There was some tequila, which was definitely more than a standard shot size. There was some pool, with me playing my typical brilliant-shot-followed-by-horrific-shot style of pool, all being overseen by a random professional player in the corner. There was more porn, this time being won in the weirdest grab-machine game in the world (it was either a stuffed toy, or a dirty DVD. And then there was Mike. Big loud American Mike, who is part of the woodwork of the Dirty Donkey. Between falling in love with us girls, to trying to set up Claire with some local chefs, to reading Laura's palms in a rather ceremonial style, Mike definitely made an impression on us. And then there was Laura's half drunken slur to me; "Is this racist? Do you play rugby?"

As part of the last group to leave the next day, I had to bid farewell to my new friends one by one. We had an excellent week of rocks, where we all learnt a lot, including who we don't want to do PhD's with! We'd had fun whether it be in the field or in a certain den of iniquity. I now have sofas to crash on in Texas, Alabama, Illinois, Denver, California and Michigan. Likewise if anyone happens to pass through Newfoundland I would be happy to relive the tales of the Field Forum.

Returning back to San Francisco I was feeling the post-conference lull, where I just wanted to be back at home and not living out of a suitcase, despite having not lived in my house back in Canada yet. Determined not to let the blues get the better of me I headed back to Pier 39 to rent a bike so I could see the Golden Gate Bridge. What a great decision that was. Getting there by Cable Car, something I didn't do the previous week, was a great call, and I had a fabulous if not momentarily scary ride hanging off the front. Renting a bike at around 6 meant I would get to see the sunset at some point in the ride. And it didn't let me down.

Cable Car ride with a hilarious driver.

Me and my bike at the Golden Gate Bridge.

I make it onto the bridge!

Awesome sunset on the Pacific side of the bridge.

Murky looking dusk photograph of the bridge and an awesome city.

I returned to St John's after a looooooong trip where I clocked up gosh knows how many miles. Minus my legs, I only came back having caught the sun, which was a success by my standards! Getting into my new house at 2am in the morning I fell asleep immediately despite the lack of bedding. Two days later I might have finally recovered from the jet-lag that hit me yesterday. Oh, and to top off my amazing US adventure, I return to a hurricane passing through Newfoundland. Nothing damaged and all safe, it was an excellent bookend to the most exciting two and a half weeks of my life. Now to start being a actual student!

PS. Great work if you made it to the end of the blog, sorry it was such a long one!! And there's many more pictures on my Facebook page if you're that much of a stalker.