Snow is cool! ❄️ @cryospheroid@scholar.social

#introduction
Hello everyone! I’m a PhD student studying atmospheric physics; Arctic snow, at the moment, to be more specific. Most of my work is of the computational/data analysis variety, though I’m working both with data from remote sensing observations and from models. I spend much of my time wrangling large datasets with Python, but thankfully, I enjoy doing it (most of the time)!

Incidentally, the research group I’m in now has a long history of duplicated names

When I joined, there were two people with very similar names, and now there’s two people whose names are very similar to mine

I’m emailing back and forth between someone whose name differs by only one letter from mine, and I’m thinking it’s only a matter of time before I accidentally get our names mixed up and sign off as them

Too bad I’ve been too swamped with work all day to read up more on it, but I did get to see the unveiling, and that was cool!

All of the hype about M87 today has warmed my heart

Current mood: neglecting working on my own research in favour of getting excited about Sagittarius A*

All my colleagues in my research group are really friendly and chill, I’m so grateful for all of them!

Thinking about how my calculations can be slightly optimized is my way of procrastinating, gah

I wish prepackaged standard deviation calculation packages had an option you could toggle to also output the mean, so that I don’t have to go and calculate the mean a second time.

When you’ve got a hefty dataset, this sort of thing can make a difference... though to be fair, my dataset isn’t that hefty, all the calculations get done within five minutes or so; it’s just the principle of the thing, I guess.

To be clear, I do really want to do field work, it’s just that the opportunity has yet to present itself (though I do tell basically everyone I meet)

I very much enjoy my research, but it makes me a bit sad every time someone gets disappointed when they ask me if I do field work and I say “no”

I’m going to 2 conferences this summer and 1 extended academic international trip (to talk to and learn from some folks doing similar research to me) and it’s going to be fun, but I don’t enjoy booking places to stay and filling out reimbursement forms and wading through pages upon pages of text to figure out if I need a visa in advance or not (I don’t, thankfully)

I wanted to spend my afternoon doing research but instead, I spent most of it worrying about logistics