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25 November 2015
Altered states (of lava domes)
Time for some shameless self-promotion – but also some research blogging. Last week I (finally) had a paper come out about my graduate modeling work on the hydrothermal systems and alteration in lava domes. (I’m sorry it’s not open access – I couldn’t afford it this time! But feel free to contact me if you want a copy.) Basically, the rundown is this: Lava domes, like volcanoes in general, are big …
22 October 2015
Being objective (with yourself)
I recently recorded a podcast with Chris Jones of Rock Your Research (check out that website – he’s had some great guests on so far!) The very first question I got to answer about grad school was what I struggled the most with, and all those of you who’ve gone through grad school can probably guess that I said “impostor syndrome”. I’ve written a little bit about it before, but it’s …
4 January 2015
Punctuated equilibrium of the career
Happy New Year! 2014 was full of big, rapid changes for me, which is what prompted me to think about the punctuated equilibrium concept.
3 January 2014
What I’ve learned in grad school
A couple of weeks ago was my (gasp) six-year “blogiversary”, which I always forget about. But the end of one year and the beginning of a new one always seems to call for more introspective posts, and for my first post of the new year I thought I’d write about the main reason I started this blog: graduate school.
22 November 2013
Resurrected post: Academic jobs are “laid-back”? Not exactly.
Doubtless those of you who are interested in science careers have seen the many offended blog posts prompted by that fairly ill-considered Forbes article about how professors/academics have the most laid-back jobs because they only teach one or two classes a semester. After getting my hysterical laughter under control, I started thinking about all the comments where people describe how their typical academic day. I’m certainly not surprised by the long descriptions of everything that has to get done (and often doesn’t) during a professor’s day, but I did notice that there wasn’t much there from students.
7 November 2013
Pumpkin ‘cratering’ and a farewell to Buffalo
Despite the frantic packing and last-minute paperwork of my last few days in Buffalo, I managed to take a little time on the last day to go watch a UB Geology tradition: pumpkin impact cratering. It’s an introductory lab that we usually try to do around Halloween, one that I remember teaching almost four years ago now, where students get to drop pumpkins off the roof of one of the buildings on camps and see what happens. Obviously there’s a lot more involved for the lab students – they very diligently measured the pumpkins and the resulting impact sites and cleaned up quite nicely afterwards – but as a departing grad, I got to enjoy the show without having to do any recording. It’s a fun lab and a relevant one, especially since we’ve recently seen what happens when even a relatively small body heads for the Earth.
21 August 2013
Update
It’s been very quiet around here, mainly because I’ve been working nonstop to finish writing my dissertation. (By ‘nonstop’ I mean I’m dreaming about figures and waking up a couple of times a night to write notes down on the pads I’ve started leaving around my apartment…) At any rate, posting is going to be spotty for the next month or so, until I get the craziness back to manageable …
26 July 2013
Streamflow and storms at Glen Falls
In between bouts of hottish weather (I don’t count it as hot unless it’s well into the nineties and the humidity is fairly high) and the occasional cool day like today, we’ve been having some fairly spectacular thunderstorms in Buffalo. That’s no unusual thing in the summertime, but after teaching a chunk of an intro course about streamflow and what happens after it rains, I’ve started paying more attention to water features in my area.
23 May 2013
Starting off the summer with a bang: More man-made maars
Today’s guest post was written by Alison Graettinger, a postdoc in the UB Geology department who’s working with the Center for Geohazard Studies. She was in charge of the series of maar-creation experiments I helped out at a few weeks ago, which are a followup to the experiments that I wrote about last year. She offered to put together this post so you could learn a bit about the science and international collaborations behind the experiments.
6 May 2013
End of semester update
…and I finally, finally have a chance to breathe. It’s been a really busy couple of months for me – not just because I was teaching a lecture class for the first time, but because I was also getting ready for my technical thesis defense.
Jessica Ball is a volcanologist at the U.S. Geological Survey, researching volcanic hydrothermal systems and stability, and doing science communication for the California Volcano Observatory. She previously worked at the Geological Society of America's Washington DC Policy Office, learning about the intersection of Earth science and legislative affairs. Her Mendenhall postdoc and PhD focused on how water affects the stability of volcanoes, and involved both field investigations and numerical modeling applications. Her blogging covers a range of topics, from her experiences in academic geosciences to science outreach and communication to her field and lab work in volcanology.