Week Six: Tucson
This week brought my internship to a close. Here I am back in Telluride. The six weeks went by pretty fast and I know that my final two weeks of summer will go even faster.
However it was a pretty normal week in the lab for everyone, including me. I mostly mounted cores this week with a little bit of measuring. I finished my paper and I thought it turned out well. My mom did find several errors though. I added some pictures and figures so it's nice and colorful.
With the wood, I believe that there are only six sites left to be mounted. By the end I became much more efficient and faster at mounting. I started to make a tape ball out of all the used tape, it's probably the size of a size 4 soccer ball.
I am still pretty slow at measuring, at least compared to the other lab techs. I usually have to remeasure one decade per core. There are still many updated and archived sites to be measured, but they will be left for the techs to finish.
Dan, Clare, and I departed from Tucson at 4:45 am Arizona time and arrived in Telluride around 5:00 Mountain time. It was long, but not too long. The worst part was probably being stopped for 45 min in construction traffic outside of Kayenta on the Navajo Reservation, which really wasn't too bad.
It's nice to be back. I enjoyed my internship. My favorite part was the field work we completed in the first week. It was awesome to be outside in the forest collecting samples. Time was well spent with Connie and Mark as well. As you can imagine Tucson was hot, but I really only spent about an average of 20 minutes outside a day commuting on my bike to the lab. The rest of my time in Tucson was in the AC. I worked about 40 hours a week in the lab. It was a good amount of time I thought, enough to keep me busy and not bored. It also allotted me with some down time, which is an important part of summer to me. In the end, My internship was very worthwhile and educational. If I could have had it my way I would have been in the field the whole time, but that isn't how the scientific process works. The majority of work and time is spent in the lab. In reality, I bet that each sample taken from a tree in five minutes translates to at least two to three hours of work in the lab when it's all through.
I'd like to say thanks to Pinhead for giving me this great opportunity. Thanks to Julie for setting me up with the Monsoon Project. Thanks to Connie and Mark for being awesome on our field trip. And a special thanks to Dan for not only mentoring me, but doing much more than that for me in Tucson.
However it was a pretty normal week in the lab for everyone, including me. I mostly mounted cores this week with a little bit of measuring. I finished my paper and I thought it turned out well. My mom did find several errors though. I added some pictures and figures so it's nice and colorful.
With the wood, I believe that there are only six sites left to be mounted. By the end I became much more efficient and faster at mounting. I started to make a tape ball out of all the used tape, it's probably the size of a size 4 soccer ball.
I am still pretty slow at measuring, at least compared to the other lab techs. I usually have to remeasure one decade per core. There are still many updated and archived sites to be measured, but they will be left for the techs to finish.
Dan, Clare, and I departed from Tucson at 4:45 am Arizona time and arrived in Telluride around 5:00 Mountain time. It was long, but not too long. The worst part was probably being stopped for 45 min in construction traffic outside of Kayenta on the Navajo Reservation, which really wasn't too bad.
It's nice to be back. I enjoyed my internship. My favorite part was the field work we completed in the first week. It was awesome to be outside in the forest collecting samples. Time was well spent with Connie and Mark as well. As you can imagine Tucson was hot, but I really only spent about an average of 20 minutes outside a day commuting on my bike to the lab. The rest of my time in Tucson was in the AC. I worked about 40 hours a week in the lab. It was a good amount of time I thought, enough to keep me busy and not bored. It also allotted me with some down time, which is an important part of summer to me. In the end, My internship was very worthwhile and educational. If I could have had it my way I would have been in the field the whole time, but that isn't how the scientific process works. The majority of work and time is spent in the lab. In reality, I bet that each sample taken from a tree in five minutes translates to at least two to three hours of work in the lab when it's all through.
I'd like to say thanks to Pinhead for giving me this great opportunity. Thanks to Julie for setting me up with the Monsoon Project. Thanks to Connie and Mark for being awesome on our field trip. And a special thanks to Dan for not only mentoring me, but doing much more than that for me in Tucson.
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