Two more meetings
I'm doing this a bit after the fact, but I never wrote in about the meetings I had with Profs. Saylor and Hauck. I met with both of them right before Spring Break, and both were productive meetings.
Prof. Saylor and I talked about the GIS project that she had mentioned in class. The project sounds very appealing, but I'm still trying to hammer out more specifics. It would involve correlating geologic and anthropologic data from early hominid studies in Ethiopia and fitting them together on a computer in an attempt to answer geographic questions like "are early hominid fossils more common in the area of XYZ geological feature." I could also ask paleoclimate sorts of questions by looking at information regarding historic bodies of water. It sounds neat, but unfortunately I need to talk to Dr. Simpson in the medical school, who was in Ethiopia when Prof. Saylor and I met. More research should help me figure out the specifics of this project.
The second meeting I had before break was with Prof. Hauck, which also produced some interesting ideas. He had a bunch of different projects that I could work on, all involving planetary computer modeling to solve small parts of various large-scale questions, like "does Mercury have a liquid outer core?" The problems grab my attention, and I know basically the pattern of the work that would be involved, which is sorely lacking from the prospective GIS project. On the other hand, I may be able to continue doing not-for-credit research with Prof. Hauck, in which case it might be nice to work on a senior project in a slightly different area. I need to do some more thinking about this.
Comments