Summertime brings lots of good things to college students: mainly, freedom from classes; this also gives them time to imagine new unfounded fears of professors they've never met before.
If they're undergraduates. By the time I reached graduate school, I realized that 99.999% of stuff on RateMyProfessors was students whining because they either (a) got caught cheating, or (b) were too lazy and didn't pay attention/take notes in class. But that's neither here nor there!
For graduate students, that first summer is usually an important point in something special: thesis hours! And I, like all thesis students, am doing lots and lots of... research! And among the many things I have found during this research:
It's fun and enjoyable. When you are doing something you enjoy and find interesting, suddenly it's a pleasure to be taking those credit hours. And because it is enjoyable and engaging, you get a lot more work done in a day than you do when writing a research paper for Intro to Literature. Talk to your professors; see which ones share your interests!
My current projects lie more in finding causes of temperature biases in sea surface temperature records. In 6 months, when my thesis is all said and done, you'll get to hear it at the DMES graduate student seminar, though it'll be extremely difficult to put such a vast project with some potentially before-unused techniques into 15 minutes!
The best part of such research, particularly the amounts of programming in Fortran and statistical analysis in R, is that it prepares the student to go into any specialty of doctoral school. Data analysis, historical research, instrumentation examination, and understanding regional and global climatology are all just a small part of what goes into such projects. It's not that the data is the way it is; it's why the data is the way it is.
OK, this isn't much. But I figured you deserved some kind of update after 8 months of silence! Hopefully in the next week or so I will be able to share some stuff about severe storm thermodynamics and maybe show how it works in a real scenario from last week!
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