I've now been in the EBIO department for over a year. I guess this blog got lost in the weeds of graduate school. Fall classes last year included a departmental introductory course, a seminar on Land Degradation and Restoration, and a seminar on the ecology of ecosystem services. Spring classes included Spatial Ecology and a writing seminar. Most of my courses at SUNY-ESF required a hefty term-paper on topics from the course. Most of my courses at CU Boulder ask for manuscript-style papers which are often collaboratively written. I find these papers much harder to write because collaborative papers seem to fail when no one is the lead author and when no one has a strong vision for what the paper should be. I have not been a part of one that I am proud of.
This summer was spent in the laboratory. My lab assistant, Sallie is now a Master's student in the lab working on arid fungi. We went through hundreds of soil samples to pick out litter, weigh samples, and generally prepare for different analyses. Now it is the fall of 2020 and I am taking one course, Metagenomics with Noah Fierer and Hannah Holland-Moritz. I am not teaching, but instead I spend the majority of time in the lab working on chlorophyll a extractions, soil sugar extractions, and other soil analyses. I continue to co-organize the BioFrontiers QED Supergroup with Kate Bubar, and I have been deciding which departmental groups to stay involved with. The flow of school is so different now. Everything has moved to Zoom, we wear masks all day long on campus, we stay 6' away from all other people. It is such a relief to come home, take off the mask, and move without worry throughout the home. COVID is challenging, but it seems new challenges pop up constantly. The latest being several wildfires in the area, evacuations, and concern about air quality. Meanwhile, we are watching the presidential debates, Supreme Court justice hearings, and wondering what is going to happen in 10 days when the votes are cast. The bromeliad in our house bloomed this fall. I've read that they bloom once in their lifetime. The bloom has lasted months, waiting for the pollinators to come, but they have not. Instead, there is now an infestation of white scale decorating the flower's stem. It is hard to tell if they are salt crystals, snow, fungi, or insect until you poke and prod and feel their sticky feet and mouths rip from the stem. Sometimes I feel like the a scale, sucking resources from the EBIO department, unable to give much back.
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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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