Thursday, April 7, 2011

Have Publication, Will Travel


After 3 and a half years of coursework, writing, editing, re-editing, and figure-tweaking...my first peer-reviewed scientific manuscript has been accepted (Journal of Glaciology).   This manuscript is based on the research I did for my Masters Degree...basically a cleaner version of my Thesis.  

Cool, am I done now?   *kidding*

In all seriousness, it's nice to see hard work pay off.  I remember back in my old office-working life I switched to a higher paying job that involved project management.  Sure, the bigger paychecks were nice, but there was no longer that tangible reward or payoff from my hard work.  Years would go by and I would simply move from one project to another.  It was a real downer not to have anything physical to look at and say, "this here, this *thing*, is what came out of those years".  I guess I could say these servers are up and running because I help build them...but it just wasn't the same.

There's a lot of negative talk about working in natural sciences, and sure the job market does stink right now.  People always quote the , "publish or perish"line.  Sure there's some truth to that if you want a good academia job, but publishing also gives you tangible accomplishments, something I like.

So may this be the first of many peer-reviewed papers that I write over my next x-number of decades.  Hopefully, they won't take as long to finish in the future :-)

As a side note, a fellow grad student in our department here (thanks Rebecca Boon) gave a recent talk on her research, and used iMovie to make an animation of how we all travel to Antarctica.  I didn't realize the new version of iMovie had these built in features (I still use the old '08 iMovie HD).  I liked it so much that I put this little animation together to show you all the travel involved for me to get to my field site, WAIS Divide, so that I can get ice-core data for my PhD.

Keep in mind, this doesn't include the 5 hour drive from State College up to Rochester.

Times:  
Roc - Chicago ~2 hrs
Chicago - LA ~4hrs
LA -  Auckland ~13hrs
Auckland - Chch ~1.5hrs
Chch - McMurdo ~5hrs
McMurdo - WAIS ~3hrs

Getting to WAIS Divide, Antarctica


Here's Rebecca's Original Video which highlights a lot of what the Penn State ice-geophysics folks due down in West Antarctica (...and yes, I'm the "PhD wannabe"....sigh)

2 comments:

Eliza Ralph-Murphy said...

Congratulations on getting published! Will you be accepting photo or comic submissions for the manuscript?

How many words and concepts would I understand? Could you translate the entire thing from "Uber-nerd" to "Obsessed Runner" for me please?

I-Movie? I guess you have to have a Mac to get that? Funny the way your name was shortened to "Fegy" in movie and "Anandakrishnan" was not.

Lakewood said...

thanks! too late for comic submissions, but I'll keep that in mind for the next one. :-)

yeah, everyone in the department just calls me "fegy", so I'm used to it.