Do you ever go through phases in which you feel you have all the time in the world and yet no time at all? Here I am, with my only true obligation being work, which occurs daily Monday through Friday but rarely lasts past 5:00 PM. Otherwise my time is my own, and I may choose to spend it in whatever way I wish.
And yet, this week, I've started to feel pressure, as if the free time I do have just isn't enough. Why? Graduate school applications. Technically, I won't begin applying to grad school until October or November. But in the interim I'm responsible for contacting hordes of graduate advisers. With most schools' ecology and evolutionary biology programs (as well as, I'm sure, most other scientific fields), students must "apply" to an adviser before applying to a school. In short, when the formal application is sent to the school, a professor must already have agreed to serve as the applicant's adviser throughout his/her course of study.
There are schools at which the adviser isn't chosen until the end of the first year, but for the majority of schools the adviser must come before admission. This presents a problem of sorts, in that a graduate adviser is someone with which I'll end up spending a great deal of time, and it's difficult to judge an individual's true personality without direct interaction.
So for the past few weeks I've been researching- both graduate schools and graduate advisers- and now I must initiate contact. Every professor I feel may have interests even remotely similar to mine is a potential candidate. I have to craft a unique email to each, one that adequately summarizes my experiences, highlights my skills and potential for graduate study, and addresses why the recipient of the email may be a good fit for my intended course of study and the specific areas of ecology wherein my (and, usually, the adviser's) interests lie.
Some parts of these emails can be copied and pasted and used and reused. After all, my interests are the same, regardless of the professor. But each potential adviser studies a different organism, taxa, or ecosystem, so I must convince him/her that I understand the types of research he/she is doing, and that his/her interests will integrate well with my own.
This requires a lot of research, reading papers the professors have authored, going through their websites (assuming they have them), looking at the research his/her current grad students are doing.... As of now I have around 25 individuals on my "to contact" list, but I feel as if that list needs to grow. Many I'll likely never hear from, others won't be accepting new students for the 2010-2011 school year. Several I'll hear from but will dislike based on their response. So perhaps you can see why I feel a little pressured... the research will take a great deal of time, and everything needs to be as well-crafted as possible, since, in many cases, no adviser = no admission.
Otherwise things have been... neutral, I suppose. Work is work. I started checking raptor nests this week, which is good for a change of pace but not necessarily fantastic. Most, if not all, of the birds born this summer have already fledged (left the nest) so I'm visiting nests to look for feathers and poop as opposed to young raptors and their parents. The former isn't quite as thrilling as the latter.
Accessing these nests turns out to be a huge problem as well. Most of the BLM land managed by our field office lies in bits and pieces spread out over hundreds and hundreds of miles. Imagine a patch-work quilt where the individual squares are of differing sizes. Most of those squares are white (private), some are green (USFS), a few are blue (state-owned), and the rest are yellow (BLM). All those yellow pieces are typically small (often only between 40 and 200 acres) and surrounded by seas of white. Thus, to access any of the little pieces of BLM land it becomes necessary to contact every private landowner between the scrap of BLM land and the nearest county road to let them know I'll be crossing their "private surface" (fun fact of the day: all of the minerals in WY, regardless of location, are federally owned and managed by the BLM).
Sometimes I'll have to cross six or seven different parcels of private land to get to the nest site. This means calling six or seven different private landowners. Just tracking down the numbers is a task; one that, for the 35 nests I need to visit, took two and half days in the office. Then I have to call! Many ranchers don't see a need to own answering machines, so I can either a) call before or after my working hours, when they're most likely to be in the house, b) keep calling throughout the day in the hopes that someone will be around, or c) call a few times and if no one answers, cross the land anyway and hope that no one is around to become confrontational.
Today was my first field day going out to check nests. I set myself up to visit seven, but only managed to hit five, and just those five took an 11-hour day. Without my trusty GPS unit (RIP, GPS... RIP), I'm forced to try and navigate a myriad of county roads and two tracks with a topographic map and a compass, a nearly impossible task in the face of countless unmarked roads and the endless, open landscape.
Still, I can't say I didn't enjoy myself. Despite it being long, it was still a good day. I brought my camera today, and found several great opportunities for photography. Prairie toads, a baby mouse, prairie falcon, red-tailed hawk, loggerhead shrike, pied-billed grebe, a large mule deer buck, and a pronghorn with her two babies all made my list of sightings today (and were captured by camera) as well as two rattlesnakes, several northern harriers, countless other pronghorn, and a very far-off golden eagle (which did not end up on my SD card).
Apart from work, there's just home. I'd love to say that the rats are coming along nicely and have begun to snuggle, but it's not happening. It seems their progress has plateaued. Although they'll accept food from me and will occasionally crawl up on my lap to explore, they still dart away at any fast movement, hide in the hammock when I walk by the cage, freeze in terror when I reach towards them, and prefer to spend their free time under the bookcase as opposed to hanging out with me.
I know that it didn't take Cassie and Gems more than a week or two to trust me, to get to the point where I could easily find them and scoop them up and carry them around, and for them to look forward to getting out of the cage to explore. At this same stage in my relationship with the girls, there were already scratches up and down my legs from their little attempts to crawl from ground level to my shoulder. They were well socialized from birth, though, so I suppose I'm not really sure how long it might take for the boys to come round, assuming they ever do.
So at least on the home front, I've been a little disheartened.
I'll live to fight another day, another week. Hmm.... maybe I'll get a pizza tomorrow after work. Mmmmm.... pizza.
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