As the other PhD students in my department prep their field gear and assemble field crews, I am feeling a little shocked that my summer will consist of no field work and no lab work. My job has become incredibly straight forward with my only task being to write. I have had many opportunities to work in the field and in the lab the past 4 years and it is now time to synthesize all of that information, time, money, effort into cohesive written units. I am reading and thinking a lot about scientific writing right now including: ways to schedule writing blocks; making my writing clear, concise, and accessible; developing a narrative from a scientific study; working with co-authors on all the stages of a manuscript; and the peer review process. All of the PhD students before me have been able to get through this step and so will I.
As all of this writing happens, I am still trying to get outside and play. There are Stroke & Strides to complete, 14ers to hike, and many miles of Boulder trails that I have not yet explored. Often I find myself writing (in my head) during these long excursions outside, where I can get away from the mundane repetition of real words being typed onto the computer and move toward high level overview writing - the kind that has to happen for a clear story to develop.
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The final part of my PhD dissertation will be a biocrust restoration meta-analysis which was started with a Powell Center working group many years ago. I have been reading tutorials and papers about meta-analysis generally, to get a sense for the methods I will be learning/employing. I have two awesome students working with me this summer to curate the biocrust database that was started by the working group. We will be checking the data together and then starting some analyses in R.
Meta-analysis is a powerful technique of quantitatively drawing together many separate scientific works to synthesize information. I did not know that I would be working on meta-analysis when I started my PhD, but I have now seen that many PhD students incorporate meta-analysis into one of their dissertation chapters as a way of broadening beyond their single experimental studies and contributing to their field in a more synthetic way. I think that it will be useful to learn, but also a huge challenge for me in the coming months. The spring semester came and went. I was a teaching assistant for the Microbiology lecture which included grading weekly in-class assignments and holding office hours for students to ask questions. I did not take any courses and my primary goal was to make significant progress on two manuscripts for my dissertation work. I was able to get one submitted to a journal and went through the peer review process for the first time. I am still in the midst of peer review. The second paper is now in outline form, and I am looking forward to submitting it for peer review in a scientific journal by mid-summer.
I am now 1 year away from the end of my PhD. I am feeling ready to wrap up all of these biological soil crust projects and to continue working with my amazing collaborators along the way to the finish line. I already have an exit talk date (April 2024). Postdoc announcements and job advertisements are starting to catch my eye. This spring there were some interesting options - a teaching position at Western State and a field station manager in the Tetons. As I move steadily to May 2024, I will be thinking about how I want to spend my final year in the Front Range (May 2024-May 2025) and what may be coming after that. Everywhere I look there is interesting work to be done and fabulous people to do that work with. Now I need to decide where I am needed most. |
AuthorSierra is a graduate student in the Barger Lab at CU Boulder studying microbial ecology for dryland restoration. Archives
August 2023
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