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.