Summer certainly seems to
be the time when all the exciting things are happening-no classes and time to
travel. The summer of 2004 was no exception, especially with plans to defend my
thesis in August. Needless to say, I spent much of the summer indoors and in
front of the computer. However, there were certainly fun times playing softball
with the Geology grad students.
In June, with the support
of Gregg Bluth, I was able to visit the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in
Greenbelt, MD. While there, I learned how to run some trajectory models. In
addition, I had to learn a little programming with IDL. And boy, that was the
challenging part! Eventually I got the hang of it. On this same trip, I
attended the 2nd International Conference on Volcanic Ash and
Aviation Safety in Alexandria, VA. It was a pretty cool conference and I got to
meet some new people and see some I had not in a while. We also went to the
Washington VAAC, which was neat. I always imagined it as something more
exciting (even though I had been to the one in Tokyo). It was basically a room
with computers. The neat thing was that right around the corner people were
also watching for hurricanes and other major weather phenomenon.
After my two week
“vacation” of sitting in conference rooms and looking at someone else’s
computer, I quickly headed back to Houghton to continue working. After a few
drafts of my thesis, Gregg and I decided that I was ready to defend and the
date of August 25, 2004 was set. Pulling everything together for the defense
was pretty stressful. Luckily, my partners in crime, Yvonne and Liz, were
extremely supportive and helped keep me grounded though the whole process. And
luck for them, I only had very brief fits of panic. Well, August 25 came around
and it was time to defend all the work that I had done in the last 2 years of
my life. I think it went quite well and was very pleased with the positive
response from other students and faculty members. The oral exam was not too
painful, even though I was pretty concerned about it, and I really did not have
too many corrections. However, classes started the next week and with 3 classes
on my plate, I did not really have lots of time to work on corrections. I
finally finished my corrections and submitted them in December. I was feeling
pretty guilty, but I found out that even if I had been done in September it
still would have technically graduated in December.
So ends my quest for the
degree of Master of Science. Now on to bigger and better things--a PhD!
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