Son of a cartographer and a computer database engineer... hm...
In thinking about senior projects and what I'd like to do, I'm learning a fair amount about where my interests really lie. I like systems. I like big, important, complicated systems. Planets, for example. It's the whole reason I went into geology in the first place - I took Prof. Matisoff's oceanography course and got drawn in by the idea of ocean circulation, and weather patterns, and plate tectonics. Those sorts of things excite me. It's not just that it's the "big picture", but these sorts of things are physically big, too. I've also realized that I like data processing. I like working with data, real or modeled, figuring out how they fit together, and making something useful out of them.
Which is why, I guess, the two projects I'm down to at the moment both involve huge-scale information processing. I'm either going to be working with Prof. Saylor, using global sets of information, or with Prof. Hauck, creating extraterrestrial data sets of my own through modeling. It's funny, because while I didn't do it intentionally, I've come down to a choice between two projects which are, at their cores, very similar. The choice rests more, now, on which one I think is going to present fewer problems in the execution. Before I do that, though, I need to talk to Prof. Saylor again and try and get in touch with Dr. Simpson. That's the next step.
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