Winter Term 2017: Dynamic Duo Wrapup

Hi folks! Monica and Simon here.

Simon here:

I had a great Winter Term. The was my first (and only) on-campus Winter Term, and I have to report that it was fabulous. I really appreciate Monica taking the time to show me around the lab and for showing me how to do what we do, and answering a multitude of questions. 

This last week has involved a lot of cleaning the lab in preparation for the start of the spring semester (See CLEAN GeoChem Lab picture to the left). I emptied a lot of sample containers by placing the samples in bags, so we'll have plenty of containers to re-use. I also learned how to refill the germanium detector's liquid nitrogen tank. Today, we all cleaned the Geochemistry lab so that it will be nice and neat for the beginning of the next semester. Next semester, I won't be doing much leaching like I did during Winter Term. Instead, I'll be doing GIS (Geographic Information Systems) stuff. I took Amanda's GIS class semester, and I'm looking forward to keeping up/improving my GIS skills since it'll be important for getting jobs after I graduate in May. Here's to a great final semester!

Monica here:

These are some of the crates we have filled with samples from China.

I spent my second half of Winter Term working on cataloging all of the lab's samples and storing them into Severance, while of course still collaborating with Simon on running samples. 

To catalog the samples, I often had to take them from metal trunks that were used to transport them from China or other Colleges and Universities and enter each sample into spreadsheets that Megan had worked on a little bit this past summer. While I am certainly not finished yet, I do feel accomplished in adding over 800 samples into our records so far. It has been exciting to see/interact with so many new types of samples. I've definitely really expanded my view of all the projects that our lab works on, and the different ways we can work with a sample to get different data sets.

Overall we both had a blast, and as usual Harbin was there to see all the misadventures, small discoveries, and mostly hours of hard work. Yet another successful Winter Term in the books, time to transition into classes and keep at the pursuit of Geomorphological knowledge!

Last day lab selfie! (We couldn't resist)