Official End of Sabbatical

By -
Luna Lovegood joined our family on Star Wars Day!
My sabbatical (or Assigned Research Leave as Miami likes to call them) officially ended when the semester did (graduation was Mother's Day weekend), but faculty are on 9-month appointments and I am not teaching this summer. So I have the summer off, right?

Well, things have quieted down considerably since most of the grad students are out doing field work and have finished up with qualifying & comprehensive exams for the year. I was also asked to fill in on a PhD oral exam since a committee member is leaving the country* (need to go read the written exam ASAP!), but otherwise I don't have any formal grad student work going on right now, either.

Since we're not doing a family trip to Kenya this year (too expensive!) I did volunteer to mentor a student in Miami's Ecology Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program. I also have a grad student doing local field work this year. My plan is to have my REU student and grad student work together in the field and it looks like that will work out well. I really like our REU program and have worked with some excellent students over the years- this year marks 10 years since I first mentored a REU student (I've been at Miami for 11 years now). The program also helps keep me focused in the summer, since we have weekly meetings, visiting scientists, etc. Staying focused in the summer is something I have always struggled with. Once I lose the structure of the semester and my daughter is home every day, it's hard to stay in work mode.

So, this year will be a summer in Oxford. My only trip will be to California to attend this workshop at Google Headquarters in Mountain View! I'm really excited about it. Otherwise, I want to learn ENVI 5.0 so I can use it for teaching in the fall. I started working through their tutorials and want to continue with that. I am also taking over as Geography undergraduate advisor (Miami calls it Chief Departmental Advisor, or CDA, but I can't hear CDA without thinking of this!) I need to learn some things before I can do that effectively, too. What plans do you have this summer?

Thoughts for future posts:

  • Landsat 8! USGS took over control of the newest Landsat satellite and they've already been archiving FREE data. I downloaded a scene but realized that ENVI isn't yet set up for importing OLI data. I may have fire up Windows (I use an iMac with VMWare Fusion to run Windows) to import it with Imagine, or just import to ENVI without the calibration in the mean time.
  • Undergraduate advising. I have advised students on research, but not for their major/minor planning, so this will be a new experience for me. What makes a good academic advisor? What mistakes should I be trying to avoid? 
  • Upcoming and proposed research projects. I am feeling rather in limbo in terms of research right now and need to get some focus. More later!

*My husband! 
Location: Oxford, OH 45056, USA

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Important Advice for College Students Regarding Grades

By -
The semester has just ended and I have received emails from several students inquiring about their grades.  Most of these emails have asked me to reconsider the grades that I reported to the university registrar and are now released to students.  These emails have become increasingly more common and also more brazen in their requests/demands.  I would like students to think long and hard before sending these end-of-semester emails and consider a few questions: Did you attend this class? If you answer "yes", but you missed more than 10% of class meetings (in my classes this would amount to missing more than three out of our 27 class meetings), how many classes did you miss?  Did you miss them for a family emergency? Due to illness? Or because you overslept or had more important things to do? Most of us have policies that allow flexibility for illness and family emergencies.  It is also good to learn what university offices can assist you with these matters. At...
Read more

Summer Plans

By -
We've reached the halfway point of the summer here at Miami (we start classes on August 24th), so it seems like a good time to take stock of what I've accomplished and what I still plan to do this summer. Progress Most of my work this summer has focused on REU and with the help of my student, we have made some good progress on a project. After some debate, I decided to stick with using some methodology that we've already used in this research, but apply it to different data. Most of the work done so far on this project (and the pilot study before the grant) focused on using fall imagery to detect Amur honeysuckle in forested areas. This shrub expands its leaves earlier in spring and retains them later in fall than the overstory tree species, and thus far, we have used fall imagery in our analysis (we felt that too many other plants were also green in spring). Recently, I started to reconsider this approach and tested some spring images for a conference presentation this spr...
Read more

Getting back into the groove

By -
My job can be really funny in some ways. I go from having ultimate flexibility in the summer to the structure and schedule of the semester. There is no transition. One day, I just get up and classes are back in session. I am teaching mornings this semester, so I have gotten back into a schedule of getting up early and coming into campus to teach. My afternoons are more open for labs, meetings, research, class planning, etc. and by 10pm, I am pretty wiped out. The first week back is always a shock to the system- I slept for 10 hours last Friday night! Once I get back into a routine, things are fine. I feel pretty good about how my classes are going so far. In my intro physical geography class, I am trying online quizzes for the first time. Every Monday morning, a new quiz is up for the students to take and they have until Friday night at 10pm to finish them. They are graded automatically, since I have the correct answers built into the quiz. There were a few technical glitches for the f...
Read more