"People
can do this for a living!"
Dr.
Robin Robertson
University of New South Wales -- Australian Defence Force
Academy
Today,
I wrote the questions for an exam for the class I am teaching
on Ocean Dynamics and polished up my lecture powerpoints and
notes. This pretty much finished my preparations for this
class and tomorrow I will get back to research.
I spent the last 7 years doing research almost exclusively.
I just started a teaching position a month ago and teaching
2 weeks ago. So the past month, I have focused on preparing
for teaching the class and haven’t done much research. I
am trying to incorporate my research into my teaching,
to make it more interesting to the students and to prepare
them for real-life situations.
For example, instead of taking hypothetical data for the questions,
I used maps and real-data, although I used hypothetical situations.
So my high point was finishing the exams and preparations.
It is always a high point to finish things. Tomorrow, I will
write a presentation (or at least start on it) that I am going
to give at the Society for Cooperative Antarctic Research
on Internal Tides in the Weddell Sea. Research involves lots
more writing than I expected, but I am getting used to it.
I got interested in Oceanography when I was in junior high
school. I found oceanography fascinating. Living in a land-locked
portion of the country, I read everything I could find on
it in the library. I remember the last chapter in one book
was careers in oceanography. My response to seeing that was
“People can do this for a living!!! I am
going to do that.” And that is what I have done since then.
I found the universities that offered a degree in Oceanography.
In high school, I took the courses suggested to get in. And
I attended one and got my degree. Now, my research focuses
on internal tides and vertical mixing processes and change
in the deep-waters of the Antarctic. I primarily do modeling
work, but have spent over 1 yr of my life at sea,
including 8 months in the Antarctic. Below is a picture of
me taking an XBT on my last research cruise, with Scuba Steve
(the mascot of the 6th grade class I was involved with as
educational outreach).
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