Holiday travel

Last week I traveled back to Minnesota to see family over Thanksgiving. For all of the flying I do, I drive down to Denver and park at a long-term lot near the airport and catch a shuttle. The drive down is just over 2 hours; if the roads are good - that is, no snow or rain - a shortcut goes through Fort Collins. In some ways, Colorado seems close. It is an easy day trip to the Fort Collins area for skiing and I have friends who have taken dance classes down there, and I made day trips to the Defenders of Wildlife Carnivore Conference in Denver last week. However, Laramie is definitely a Wyoming town.

After a bit of a break, I have been back at the biochemistry. After taking classes through undergraduate and MSc work, it can be frustrating to still be taking courses at this point. However, my field work schedule has required me to spread out lecture courses, and this material is so fundamental to my interests that it remains worthwhile to put in lots of time. I have been reviewing past coursework, and considering the needs for my disseration research and what, in general, I would like to have as my background in terms of courses. I hope to finish up courses this spring or next year.

For fall field work this year, we used a US Coast Guard icebreaker to travel to the edge of the sea ice, north of Alaska and Russia, and recapture previously-sampled polar bears. I worked with a science museum (San Francisco Exploratorium) to post dispatches about life in the field, at their website devoted to polar science: http://icestories.exploratorium.edu/dispatches/arctic-projects/the-bears-of-summer/. We disembarked from the ship in early November, leaving about 5 pallets of equipment in the cargo hold. The ship will arrive at its home port in Seattle next week, and the technician working on our project will be there to help sort and ship gear back to Laramie.

READING

After scoping out the other blogs of PiE students, I am going to plagiarize two ideas. Erin included a couple notes about items for reading, and Julie mentioned the recent editorial by David Orr in the December Conservation Biology. If you have online access to the journal, I thought it was a provoking essay.

About this blog

I am a second-year student in the Program in Ecology (PiE) at the University of Wyoming, and my hope is that this blog can provide a bit of insight into the student experience in our program and into Laramie and the surrounding area. I completed a MSc in Zoology and Physiology at the University of Wyoming in the spring of 2008. The previous fall I had begun my search for PhD programs with an interest in the University of Chicago. However, shortly thereafter a faculty from PiE advertised a PhD position for a project that lined up perfectly with my interests. I went through the application and interview process with a pool of national and international applicants, and I was very happy to be able to accept the offered position at the end.

Field work for my project began almost immediately, taking me to the north slope of Alaska several times over the next year and a half. I recently returned from 1.5 months in the field (this picture is from mid-October, on the sea ice north of Alaska), and for the first couple weeks back my life has largely focused on catching up on coursework. I am taking biochemistry this semester, and my professor has been great about allowing me to catch up at my own pace and take missed exams. While organic chemistry was one of the hardest courses I took as an undergraduate, I have had a much better time following, and even enjoying, biochemistry because so much of what we cover can be considered in an applied physiology context. I hope to put up more posts as the semester wraps up.