Dylan Elliott

How will attending AGU advance your academic and career goals?

What I am most looking forward to when attending AGU in New Orleans this December is presenting my poster from my summer research while having the opportunity to network with professors from other universities. Presenting a poster of my internship project at AGU is going to give me the opportunity to practice scientific communication. I have never had the opportunity to present a poster at a conference or perform scientific communication outside my classes. In doing so at AGU, I will be better prepared for future science communication efforts and for practicing discussing my summer research with future colleagues.

Networking about graduate school is the most crucial aspect of the meeting that will be most beneficial to both my academic and career growth. By networking with professors involved in the fields of meteorology and atmospheric science from all over the country in person at AGU, I hope to gain a better idea of which advisors I would enjoy working with, and to potentially have the chance to follow up from previous virtual meetings or cold emails that I have sent. Pursuing a graduate program will help me become a weather forecaster and give me the formal meteorology education I need to operate in both private/public weather field. Therefore, the AGU meeting this year has the potential to be one of the most career benefiting events I have ever attended.

What have you learned in your internship so far? (week 3 update)

My internship in the Zimmer lab has been an awesome combination of field work, lab work, and remote computer work. I am really enjoying how the internship is not just one of those aspects as this keeps me in constant communication and coordination of what the lab group is doing and makes me feel like part of the team.

Since being in the Zimmer lab, I have learned how to operate many different instruments and have had training in lab operations. I’ve attended many lab meetings in which we’ve gone over the more informal and unwritten advice pertaining to academic careers, jobs, goal setting, presenting, and even emailing professors. In the field I have learned how to use an auger to manually drill for shallow soil samples, how to collect leaf and stem samples for water potential measurements at 3 am, and how to calculate evapotranspiration rates. Last week, I helped a Colorado School of Mines research group out at Blue Oak Ranch Reserve collect bioturbation samples of various sizes, accurately measure and record 2 Wolman pebble counts, and perform “rock drops” in which we recorded the distance at which the pre-measured sediment chunks traveled down the slope of the hill from rolling off the palm of our hands. It was really interesting to learn about how meticulous you have to be when doing a research project out in the field to try to avoid any sampling bias, keep randomness, and do all in a timely manner.

The hands-on experiences I have had in the lab and field thus far have shown me the discipline, academic rigor, and scientific thinking required to pursue graduate school at a research university. For the soil assessment project I’m working on, I expect to find a significant difference in the amount of organic material before versus after the fires burned the soils and am hoping for other interesting findings.