Change

It's official! After 4 years in my past office, I've been moved to a new office. The new digs are on the sixth floor. It has a pretty nice view, even if it is separated from where all the main excitement happens down on the second and first floor. Might be nice when it comes time to buckle down and write my dissertation. My adviser has also been moved up to the sixth floor, so we made it feel more like home and I think it will actually turn out to be a great place to spend time and escape from the hustle and bustle.

Also, for the first time since I arrived to NIU - six years ago - I will not be teaching next semester. I have been assigned as the research assistant to the Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Affairs. While I will miss teaching, I am excited to explore this new avenue - since it too will provide me with yet another perspective within academia. Change is good.

Soil Descriptions

This week's goals:
1) Finally finish describing all my soil cores taken from my Bennett field site (by Thursday).
2) Complete another day of removing honeysuckle from my Brandt field site (on Friday).

I took 40 cores total, but that includes a duplicate core for each of my 20 plots throughout my field site. So really, I only have 20 cores to describe - I will be using one of the cores for the description and one of the cores for bulk density measurements. I still have about 8 left to describe - so here goes nothing!

So far, one of the most interesting core was this one:

It had a glacial outwash pocket of sand above dense clay at the bottom of the core! 

Honeysuckle removal has been brutal. After all, it has had about 60 years to establish itself, but we are seeing progress - which is rewarding. We are cutting and treating them with herbicide (only on the cut stumps), with the hope that it will not re-sprout as strong. The fall fire will help our efforts as well.

Outstanding Student...

I was honored to receive two awards recently: Outstanding Graduate Student Award and Outstanding Graduate Teaching Assistant Award. 

I am now in the second year of my Ph.D. program. My project has come a long way and is now fairly succinct with three separate parts that will combine to answer one main question. 

Fieldwork has begun earlier this year with the warmer-than-usual March. My biggest problem right now is protecting my field equipment from rodents. In the past, we haven't had to deal with this on the scale that we do now. So far rodents have done about $1200 worth of damage via chewing and severing wires. I am constructing armor for the equipment, so I hope that solves the problem and that I can get more complete data sets as a result! So, hopefully fieldwork goes smoothly this summer. 

I am looking forward to hearing back about the Dissertation Improvement NSF Grant I submitted. I am obviously hoping to get it, but if not, the feedback will be nice.  The feedback will hopefully benefit my project and help improve my grant proposal, so I can resubmit it in October.

I have also taken on a new commitment for the next three years - hopefully they will keep me on for the entire program! NIU has recently received an NSF grant to fund a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU). This year we have five interdisciplinary projects and 7 NSF REU participants and 12 total participants. I am the Graduate Student REU Coordinator and so far it has been fun coordinating all the logistics. I am looking forward to meeting the participants come June 17th. 

More adventures to come, I'm sure.