Wednesday, November 4, 2015

NEW HOME! Come Visit Us!

We are super pleased to announce that Sweet Tea, Science has a new home over at sweetteascience.com! We've moved onto the Wordpress platform and have a shiney new .com name. Rachel and I love blogging together and hope that this will give us a fresh, motivated push forward.


Tuesday, July 28, 2015

Meridith and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Qualifying Exam

I’ve made my way all the way to the end of my 20th year of schooling without much in the way of seemingly insurmountable challenges. Sure, the post secondary life is peppered with exams (SAT, ACT, GRE), finals, applications processes, and so on, but while all of these have caused me stress in the past, none even compare to my qualifying exams of my PhD program. This past May, after a year of courses and months of studying, I tackled three days of intense examinations which included a day of two 3-hour Stats Theory exams and nearly 48 hours of a take home applied project. I went in with months of studying, waves of support from friends and family (thanks!) , 6 pages front and back of notes to use, and even a belly full of sushi. I come out… completely and utterly defeated.


Failed like I failed to keep it together during
this episode of Dr. Who.
Going back a bit, studying leading up to these exams had pretty much become my life on top of coursework for my spring classes. The Fear and Guilt set in early and persisted throughout that time. If I was studying I was afraid of not being able to get enough exam practice and progress made in time. If I wasn’t studying, I felt guilty for spending any of the available time I had on anything else. Maintaining your mental health is important during this time, but it becomes increasingly difficult when anytime you make an effort to carve out time for yourself or your relationships that Guilt is always looming. When that first day finally arrived and we had our two theory exams, I tried to pump myself up and really believe in my abilities. I’d always pulled it together before! My brain was just. not. having it. Some of the questions threw me through a loop, some were from topics from other classes that I had not reviewed, some were fairly straightforward but my scumbag brain decided to wait to remember everything relevant until right as I was turning in my exams.

Wednesday, April 22, 2015

#EarthDayThanks and Earth Day Resolutions

Some truth about me as a person?  I'm horrible at New Years resolutions.  Don't get me wrong, I love them.  I plan them.  I hoard them, coming up with way too many and getting overly excited about all of them.  I make lists, and timelines, and mini-goals.  Unfortunately, it seems the outcome 98% of the time is a few months of triumphant, self-improving activity, followed by a slow shift back into my normal pattern of existence.  But, over the past 5 years, each Earth Day I have made a second batch of resolutions.  With this set of commitments, I've experienced an almost unprecedented success rate.  Over the years, I've greatly reduced my plastic consumption, I have committed to the concept of reusing pretty much everything, and I cut all animal derived products from my diet.  As someone who is really used to failing and having to restart as part of her daily life (because, scientist), I've started to wonder why my Earth Day Resolutions stick, while so many other intentions (I'm doing all the dishes everyday starting tomorrow!) seem to fall to the wayside.  After some reflection, I believe the reason is twofold.  First, I have strong examples of conservation champions, and, second, Earth Day Resolutions aren't actually about global impacts for me.

This is an essay in two parts.  The first part is a love letter to to the people in my life who made real for me the importance of conservation and preservation of the Earth.  The second bit contains my 2015 Earth Day Resolutions and explains why I think you should make some too!
True Confessions: I probably have enough pictures of myself hugging trees to fill an entire photo album

Tuesday, April 14, 2015

Blog Slacker Gives Peak into Real Life

Meridith and I were commiserating yesterday that we had been STS Slackers.  But, y'all, real life (RL) got so real these past few weeks.  Meridith is studying for her qualifying exams, and my lab mate and I have been racing against phenology to get our projects in the field.  We study the same invasive plant and have actually been experimenting with an amazing work sharing system.  More on that later, probably.

Anyway, all that to say, getting two blog posts out a month is pretty much where we are at these days.  We, of course, have tons of awesome plans and big ideas, but all those take time.  Time's a bit of a commodity these days.  So, in lieu of completely disappearing from the internet, I give you a peak into my RL, as seen from my iPhone.



Here we have the Rachel in her natural habitat, obnoxiously posing with an obscene amount of pin flags.  This might have been the day when I started the "You Might be an Ecologist if..." meme on Tumblr.

Wednesday, March 18, 2015

Being an Involved Grad Student

A.K.A How to being involved AND score free meals

I'm a fairly involved graduate student. Rachel is as well. The benefits are numerous, but some of the top reasons we like to be involved include contributing to our respective departments and universities, building our C.V., access to amazing workshops/events/etc, in addition to always knowing where the free food on campus is located! Below are some of our top ways for you to get involved within your own programs!


Thursday, March 5, 2015

Questions to Ask when Choosing a Graduate Adviser

A few weeks back, my graduate group had its prospective student weekend, where all the top ranked applicants get to come and meet professors and current students.  Meeting and greeting all these hopeful students got me and a few others thinking about the process of choosing a graduate adviser.  STS wrote a bit about how to find and contact prospective PIs in the past, but that post doesn’t touch on how to make a decision once you have a few professors interested in working with you.  In many academic fields, your relationship with your major professor is the most important professional relationship you will have for many, many years.  Even when you earn your degree, a prospective employer will still want to know what your mentor thought of you.  So, it’s crucial to choose a person who you feel will not only aid your academic growth, but who you are generally compatible with on a personal level.  You don’t need to be BFFs, but things like having drastically mismatched communication styles, academic expectations, or assumptions about levels of involvement can make the road to degree completion much more hazardous.  And, on a broader scale, it’s really not worth it to work with Bigshot-Publishes-Yearly-In-Nature if they are unkind, unhelpful, or unavailable.


Below, I’ve compiled a list of pretty well every question I have ever asked, been asked, or wished I’d asked during the process of choosing a graduate mentor.  I’ve divided it into three main groups:  questions to ask the professor, questions to ask graduate students in their lab, and questions to ask any graduate student in the program.  You certainly don’t have to ask all these things, but do a little soul searching beforehand and think about what really matters to you.  You are making a commitment to work with someone regularly for the next several years.  Sure, they are interviewing you, but you are also interviewing them.    


Despite the fact that this list is long, it’s obviously not exhaustive.  Give more suggestions in the comments below!        

Tuesday, February 17, 2015

Citizen Science: What, Why, and How

This is a post I’ve been intending to write for a long, long time.  It’s a lot easier to write about my day to day life as an ecologist and PhD student.  In fact, any time I turn my computer on to write something that isn’t about me or about my personal research, I get this super intense surge of imposter syndrome.  I’ll stop the unnecessary preamble there for now.  It’s just my attempt to keep my writing in this space authentic, as I think it’s important to be honest about the struggles we face, even if they are mundane (Ermahgerd, writing a blog?  What if someone *gasp* reads it?!)
____________________________________

Training citizen scientists out at Stebbins Cold Canyon UC NRS
 The term citizen science has been buzzing around in scientific circles for a number of years now.  When I first drafted this last week, the first annual conference of the Citizen Science Association was just wrapping up in San Jose, CA.  This conference showcased the amazing body of scholarly research concerning citizen science, which is telling us a larger and more coherent story about the practice every day.  I have had the pleasure of working with professional scientists and educators whose whole course of study revolves around the design and training of participants for these endeavors.  I will offer here the briefest of introductions based on my own reading and experience and a little anecdote about a citizen science group I help facilitate in my area.  For a peer-reviewed take on the matter, look to the fabulous overview by Bonney and colleagues’ from 2014 in Science (so it’s short and sweet) entitled, Next Steps for Citizen Science1.


What is Citizen Science anyway?


First things first, what is citizen science anyway?  Well, first of all, it is science.  That’s a major point to emphasize.  Data collected by these projects should answer scientific questions or test specific hypotheses.  Second, this is science being performed by individuals who are (in most cases) not formally trained as research scientists.  There is a huge variety within the citizen science genre, but, in my experience, most projects fall into three main categories:  atlas/survey, monitoring, and manipulative/experimental.  

Friday, February 6, 2015

Part 3 - And Now for Something Completely Different


How We Came to be Here - A Story in Three Parts

This week STS will be sharing stories of coming to careers in STEM fields.  We hope we can offer three different perspectives on finding your career path, navigating higher education, and deciding how and when your journey needs to change.  We’d love to hear any and all of your stories about finding your calling or your struggles/victories if you’re still trying to figure it out right now.  Please share!  It’s important for all of us (especially those in high school and undergrad) to know that there is no single, best way to approach this crazy adventure.  For Part 1, which is Rachel's story, click here. For Part 2, which is Chelsea’s story, click here.

Can I do it on my own? 
I have some impressive posts to follow! I am very lucky to have two wildly inspirational best friends that are both doing such amazing things with their lives. I suppose it’s time for my story. Unlike Rachel and Chelsea, after graduating from WKU in 2009 I took an academic year off to reconsider my options for moving forward. I’d had lots of wonderful experiences during my undergraduate years thanks to my mentor, Dr. Albert Meier. At that point I had done research, internships, studying abroad, an honors thesis, but even with all of this involvement, I still was terribly intimidated by the prospect of graduate school. Albert often reassured me that I could go straight into a PhD program, but to me that seemed like rushing the process. During the time I was working on applications to different programs I was living at home and working at a Red Robin to save money. A lot of my friends had already been accepted and moved onto graduate programs while I still had a giant pile of uncertainty in my future. This was a pretty bleak time for me.

Wednesday, February 4, 2015

Part 2: Money isn’t Everything - or - Breaking up with Science

How We Came to be Here - A Story in Three Parts

This week STS will be sharing stories of coming to careers in STEM fields.  We hope we can offer three different perspectives on finding your career path, navigating higher education, and deciding how and when your journey needs to change.  We’d love to hear any and all of your stories about finding your calling or your struggles/victories if you’re still trying to figure it out right now.  Please share!  It’s important for all of us (especially those in high school and undergrad) to know that there is no single, best way to approach this crazy adventure. For Part 1, which is Rachel's story, click here.  
________________________

My name is Chelsea. I have known Meridith since I moved to Kentucky in 1996. That was 19 year ago! Before anything else, I would like to use this guest post as a forum to show some funny pictures of us together, and then I will talk about science.
IMG_1100.JPG
Photographic evidence of Meridith and Chelsea’s especially long friendship. This was taken at Meridith’s house in 1997.
Part 2: Money isn’t Everything - or - Breaking up with Science

Monday, February 2, 2015

Part 1: A Totally Expected Journey

How We Came to be Here - A Story in Three Parts

This week, myself, Meridith, and a guest author, will be sharing our stories of coming to careers in STEM fields.  We hope we can offer three different perspectives on finding your career path, navigating higher education, and deciding how and when your journey needs to change.  We’d love to hear any and all of your stories about finding your calling or your struggles/victories if you’re still trying to figure it out right now.  Please share!  It’s important for all of us (especially those in high school and undergrad) to know that there is no single, best way to approach this crazy adventure.      

“It is not the only or the easiest way to come to the truth. It is one way.” - Wendell Berry


Part 1:  A Totally Expected Journey


When applying for my PhD program, my soon-to-be mentor offered up some solid advice about writing and entrance essay to an ecology graduate program, “For the love of God, don’t tell us how you were a little kid with a bucket on the beach.”  Good advice for standing out in the pile of 100 essays written by little kids playing in the sand who grew up to become would-be scientists playing the sand.  I am, now, going to completely disregard that advice.  Here, making our point this week, I think it’s important.

Tuesday, January 20, 2015

Hindsight and Foresight

My Cohort Chums getting their learn on.
I finished my first semester of my PhD program last month after a long, very long, oh-so-long semester. For context, my previous educational career was in the biological sciences, but when applying to grad school (round two) I made the decision to pursue a degree in Statistics. This semester has held a lot of firsts, frustrations, and failures, but now that the dust has settled, I can look back on it with a clear view (hindsight is 20/20!). I want to take this time to reflect so that I can hopefully emerge with a more confident approach to my future semesters.

Tuesday, January 13, 2015

Science Travel 2014: A Year in Review

I figured I needed to write this post before we were too far down our 2015 paths to really justify reflecting on 2014.  As readers of this blog know, I’m all about conservation, but I’m also adamant about getting out there and enjoying nature and engaging in science for fun.  Life is busy, and making time for these sorts of experiences can be a challenge, but it’s so worth it.  We owe it to ourselves.  


“The mountains are calling, and I must go.” ― John Muir


Off the road on Beartooth Scenic Highway - Sept. 2014
In 2014, I hiked, swam, ran, and learned.  Interested in where I went and what I saw?  Read on!  Fair warning, this is a photo heavy post, which is really what I’m most interested when “reading” about nature.

Wednesday, January 7, 2015

A RefreshED Look Back at STS's First Year

Sweet Tea, Science, the idea, was proposed by Rachel in November of 2013. However, it was during our annual get together with our wildly amazing group of friends for New Years 2013/2014 that the ball really got rolling over on our Tumblr. Recently, we've brought in the New Year once more with some of our favorite, most inspirational people in the world. Among these friends is the creative whirlwind that is J.D. VanSlyke, one half of the voices behind our favorite podcast: RefreshED! He was kind enough to lead this interview so that we may share some of what we've done over the past year, and a lot of what we're thinking for the future!




HUGE thanks to JD for his completely fantastic interview questions. Be sure to tune into RefreshED this year. We are very much looking forward to the times ahead and the opportunities that may present themselves. Please let us know if you have any ideas for potential guest posts or if you'd like to collaborate with us in some way! 

Thursday, January 1, 2015

2014 Reflections, Resolutions, and Round-Up

Hello, 2015! Rachel and I are living it up with our lovely friends in Boston. This year has been wonderful thus far, but we wanted to take a few moments and reflect on the great things that 2014 brought to us.  One of the most rewarding things for us, in the last year, was starting this blog.  From the launch of our Tumblr blog in January of 2014 to occupying this space in May, we feel so blessed to have this space to share our experiences as travelers, learners, and burgeoning female scientists!

Starting the new year sharing the same physical space is always a blessing for us as a creative duo.  We've been discussing our ideas/hopes/dreams for the future of Sweet Tea, Science, and you can rest assured that we are cooking up some exciting content for 2015!

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