One of the most rewarding aspects of a campaign like this, besides the obvious quest of scientific inquiry, is the great
Postdoc Tim Guasco and graduate student Doug Collins calibrate an ATOFMS instrument named Laverne.
teaching and learning opportunities between all the people working on this question. From undergraduates working on their very first research projects and up, there have been many opportunities for both learning and teaching to occur. As a younger graduate student, I find myself lucky to be in an intermediate position where I get to learn from those more experienced, while still being able to pass on my knowledge and experience to students coming up.
There are countless words I could use to describe the various educationally enriching activities that occur at the Hydraulics Lab every minute of our considerable days; how faculty, post-docs, and graduate students interact closely, every person teaching those around them about their experiences, while eagerly learning from others. As the trope goes though, a picture is worth a thousand words, so let me save many thousands of words and show these teaching moments in action.
Professor Tim Bertram assists graduate student Michelle Kim in setting up their CI-TOFMS for trace gas measurements
There are also many opportunities behind the scenes; as a part of our efforts to maintain a continuous monitoring of the seawater chemistry, a large collection of undergraduates and younger graduate students have been working, with the assistance of Dr. Robert Pomeroy and George Anderson, on performing many analytical techniques. It has been my great pleasure to help coordinate this effort, as it has given me an opportunity to work closely with many younger students. This is one of the aspects of being a graduate student that I find most rewarding, and I’m really grateful for the opportunities this experiment has provided for me to explore this interest with the help of future researchers!
First year graduate student Camille Sultana and undergraduate Mallory Pickett prepare equipment and reagents for the many water analysis techniques that will be employed during the study.
Postdoc Andy Ault and graduate student Carly Ebben prepare various types of substrates for offline analysis of aerosols.
Matt Ruppel, Graduate Student, Prather Research Group; University of California, San Diego