This week, a familiar face returns to the lab with Alex Innanen's first post as a MSc student. You may recall a few years ago she worked with us looking at images from Mars' north polar cap. That work has since been published with more outputs on the way. In the interim she chose to pursue more terrestrial projects before returning with us to the stars.
By Alex Innanen
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a graduating student must be in want of an answer to the question: “what’s next?” If I had a dime for every time I heard some variation on that question leading up to my graduation, I would have been able to finance my undergrad. I am here to tell you – it is okay to not know. It’s normal! You will figure it out and it will be fine. Feeling reassured? Or just skeptical? That’s also normal, but trust me, reader, I have plenty of experience with Not Knowing.
When I was in my final year of my undergraduate, I was volunteering sporadically with PVL and also worrying excessively about what I was going to do once this whole school thing was over. Could I do more school? Maybe, but I wasn’t entirely sure what I wanted to do more school in, and also I was very tired from being in school more or less constantly since the age of five. Some people don’t burn out from school – I did. This is also (say it with me) perfectly fine and normal. At any rate, I was rapidly approaching the end of the school year with very little direction. All I had was a summer job, working in the civil engineering department in a geotechnical lab until the end of August. Or so I thought…
So began my year (and change) in the world of rock mechanics. Now, this is not necessarily the furthest thing from planetary science – after all, what are planets if not very, very large rocks (a lot more, it turns out. See: the entire field of planetary science). However, in my five years of space engineering I never once had to know the different morphologies of metamorphic rocks, or how temperature can impact fracturing. But I learned – not only how to tell a schist from a gneiss, but also that being a research assistant in a rock mechanics lab is not really all that different from being a research assistant in a planetary volatiles lab.
Which was very good because it turns out that it’s not just looking at pretty pictures of Mars I enjoy, it’s research. It’s figuring stuff out and learning new things and puzzling over problems. And okay, sure, looking at pretty things is nice too. I got to see a number of pretty rocks in my time in the geotech lab. I also got to help design labs for a second year geotechnical course, and work with grade 11 summer students as part of a research and mentorship program, and help design a thermal camera setup to monitor the temperature of a cliff face in the Valley of the Kings, and lots more. It was busy, but it was also restful. I had a lot of time to catch up on five years of sleep I’d missed out on in undergrad, and to think about, okay, what do I actually want to do next? I couldn’t continue working in the rock mechanics lab indefinitely. I enjoyed it, but rocks just didn’t spark my interest in a, “oh yeah, I want to study this for the next two-to-six years” kind of way. But maybe I did want to spend a little more time in academia.
So I started applying to grad school, and without the pressure of my final year of undergrad, I was able to look into what I wanted to do, where I might want to go – in short I was answering that question: what’s next. It turns out that what I needed to answer that question was time – time to explore what made me happy, what lit my interest, time to think about what I really wanted to get out of my post-undergraduate life. And in my explorations, I found my way back to what had been my passion for nearly my whole life: space. So, dear reader, if you’re feeling overwhelmed or unsure, take that time, learn and grow and discover what makes you tick. Because doing what you’re passionate about? It rocks.
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