On "talent": A few words for young people in science

The title of this post says young people, but really this is applicable to anyone. I've been meaning to write something along these lines for ages now, but seeing some of the people on the nasa-offical tumblr (disclaimer: not actually NASA, but a very sweet person who I'm sure will flourish in the world of academic science) has pushed it to the forefront of my mind. 

Given that I have a habit of starting to write things and never finishing them, I thought I'd crack on and actually do this one. Anyway, here's a quick reminder of where I stand in science:

• MGeol: 1st class. This is an integrated Master of Geology degree, meaning that I do my BSc and Masters as one 4 year block at the same institution
• Areas of expertise:
• Igneous geology - think lava.
• Planetary geology - think space.
• HED meteorites -think lava in space. 
• Scanning Electron Microscopy - a fancy way to look at very small things
• Publishing history:
• Conference abstract for the 79th Annual Meeting of the Meteoritical Society: Mitchell, J.T., Stephen, N.R. (2016), Revisiting NWA 3141, 8266, and 8594: Two eucrites and a howardite? Meteoritics & Planetary Science, Volume 51, Issue S1 
• Applying for PhDs

So. Here's the thing.

Science at school is approached in a way that actually makes it very difficult to stick with. If you aren't "naturally talented" at science or maths then you'd better just give up because you'll never make it. Maths is everything. You must be good at maths. You will fail at life if you cannot do maths. 

Importantly, this is utter bullshit. Sometimes, though, it seems all too real.

Now, I failed maths pretty catastrophically when I did my A levels (from some quick googling, these seem to be roughly equivalent to US AP exams). In fact, I failed so badly at my maths AS level, I never got around to doing the A2. Instead, I resat the exam and just scraped a pass. That being said, I actually did really well in the astrophysics and radioactivity modules of my Physics A level, which we were all told we could not do if we weren't really damn good at maths. 

Did my apparent inability hold me back? No, but it was a massive blow. I worked as hard as I could, but I couldn't produce results in the exam no matter what. It left me doubting myself and I had a major drop in confidence (I'd never failed an exam before), but you pick yourself up and you carry on.

A lot of people I know, myself included, have thought that at some point they are not talented enough to pursue science in academia or as a career. This word "talent" is a weird one and, quite frankly, I don't think it has much place here. It implies that you are naturally gifted for science and if you're not one of these chosen few, then there's no hope. I'll admit that some people do have an affinity for it. I'm one of those people. However - and it's a big however - you can learn. 

If you are passionate enough about a subject, you enjoy learning it. Why did I do so well at astrophysics when I could barely pass maths? Because I enjoyed it. That makes a world of difference and is one of the main things that distinguishes science at university to science at school: you are there because you worked hard, because you want to be there, and it should be because you enjoy it. University is a large chunk of your life, and I see no point in studying something you hate.

The hardest thing is dealing with what people expect of you. There is so much pressure from school as is, the last thing you need is to have that from home as well. For a very long time, my grandparents made it abundantly clear that I was expected to do literature as is befitting of a young woman in their view. My mother put them back in their place very simply by saying this:

"Wouldn't you rather she was happy?"

So often, people forget that you should enjoy what you do. It has become commonplace to despise your job, to let it make you anxious and sick. Buck that trend. Strive for what you want to do. Your choice to study science is entirely yours. If you are interested enough and willing enough, you'll develop a work ethic that allows you to succeed. You can drive ideas and imagination to hypothesis and theory, and you'll love it.

Science is wonderful because it can unlock a childish glee in all of us. We all have that one part of science that blows us away over and over again. For me, it's space and planets. It's holding rocks that are 4.6 billion years old and working out how and why they form. For others, it's dinosaurs, or sharks and whales, it's medicine and curing people, it's powering entire nations with new technology, it's studying why humans are as they are and why everything else is as it is. 

Find your thing. Find what sparks your interest and never let it go. It won't always be easy. There'll definitely be days where you think becoming a hermit would be a much better use of your time (I've had many a day like that), and that's normal. Take a breather. Finish the essay or report or whatever it is. Re-ignite your passion and look forwards to the next thing.

And so, young scientists, it is really quite simple:

Be passionate, above all else. 

The End of University / Berlin / MetSoc 2016

So last time I posted anything was back in March. I'm really terrible at this, it seems. Anyway, let's have a quick update on things.

• I completed my MGeol thesis, which was entitled "Monomict Eucrites: A Comparative Petrology from Scanning Electron Microscopy". You can read about it in more detail here, but basically I compared 6 meteorite samples that are classified as the same type of rock and found a load of differences between them.
• The presentation also went fine even though I didn't feel all that prepared for it. I got some very good feedback which was lovely.
• Final mark for the thesis report = First Class
• Final overall degree mark = First Class

Safe to say I'm very proud of myself.

The past four years of university have definitely had their ups and downs, but it's been a wonderful time. I've made some truly brilliant friends and that chance to be taught and study alongside experts is an experience that I'll treasure forever. I somehow ended up studying one of my original passions and I wouldn't change it for the world. I'll admit, student life is really damn hard. You have no money, no hobbies, and not enough time to study and maintain a decent social life, but for me it was worth it. 

Swiftly moving on to something much more interesting (maybe)...

I'm currently in Berlin! 

Berlin Victory Column, Tiergarten

I'm here to attend the 79th annual meeting of the Meteoritical Society, which is made up of researchers across the world who study meteorites in all their forms. It's a five day conference, but I booked a few extra days at the hotel so I could be a tourist and have a break from life at home. I managed to get to Tiergarten yesterday before the thunder storm arrived, and had a rather good sandwich made of salami, cheese, and mayonnaise - not a combination I'd ever considered but would recommend.

Rosengarten, Tiergarten

So, what will I be doing here?

Mostly, just attending talks (which start at 08:30 for some god awful reason) and trying to navigate my way around the city without knowing a single word of German. I did Spanish at school. It has never once come in handy. Other than that, I will be presenting some of my findings from my thesis in poster form along with a load of other researchers.

It's quite intimidating, really. I'm painfully aware that these people know so much compared to me and have been working in the field for years (if not decades). I've recognised a load of names from various papers that I've read, but my adviser has promised to introduce me to as many people as possible. I'm hoping to network and hand out a few CVs, but mostly to gain contacts in case anyone has a PhD in the works. Apparently most people in meteoritics are hired based on personal recommendation, so it helps if you know a lot of people.

We'll see how it goes. I've gotten the hang of the trains here, but I still get lost in the streets.

Once I'm back in England, I get to start work at the university as a "research associate" and get paid on a research bursary. The plan is to learn a new technique to go along with scanning electron microscopy, and to look at a wider range of meteorite types. I'm hoping to get a paper published, which would massively help with getting a PhD position (or applying for more senior positions in industry). 

I'm looking forwards to it. The past year at university has really taught me that I belong in academia and that research is my forte. I hope to be able to continue my studies, but I'm making several back up plans in case it doesn't work out.

So, that's that. 

I'm hoping to write a daily (or every other day) post about the MetSoc meeting that I'm in Berlin for. It'll be an interesting experience - I've never been to a conference before, and I'll be there as an undergraduate student too. I'm sure it'll be fine. I just need to be brave!

Slices of Space

Hello again! It's been ages since the last post... Anyway, today is an update on my research project and the life as a Masters student battling with software and variable motivation. I've tried to put links to all the sciency bits to help explain.

This little piece of rock is roughly 4.6 billion years old. That's 4,600,000,000 years. It's a type of meteorite known as a 'howardite', which are made from the broken pieces of lots of rocks. I bought it from eBay, which according to my adviser is one of the best places to buy samples from. This particular one is NWA 1929, and is officially cataloged here. It weighs less than a gram, but I still think it's pretty cool. 

Now, why did I buy it?

Well, that's because I'm doing an independent research project for my final year of my MGeol degree. Oh, MGeol is an integrated geology masters. The focus of my research is working out what sort of rocks there might be on Vesta. In particular, I'm looking at eucrites (pretty much space basalt) with a scanning electron microscope to analyse the minerals and textures in super high detail. 

First of all though, let's have a quick run-down on Vesta.

Vesta is a proto-planet in the asteroid belt, and was first discovered in 1807. It is 'differentiated', meaning that it was able to form a crust, mantle, and core - just like Earth. 

However, it never made it to being a proper planet, and now hurtles around the Sun once every 1,325 days. Vesta is thought to be the parent body for many HED meteorites. These are all igneous rocks, similar to basalts and gabbros on Earth. These meteorites were launched from the surface of Vesta by impacts from other bodies in the asteroid belt, particularly in the Rheasilvia Basin at the south pole of Vesta. This basin is a 500km impact crater that gives Vesta a bit of a funny shape at the bottom.

Anyway, NASA launched the Dawn mission in 2007, which arrived at Vesta in 2011 and orbited for a year or so before moving onto Ceres. Currently, Dawn is here.

Dawn was able to send back a load of data, including images, infra-red, and gamma ray data. From that, scientists have been able to make a rough geological map of Vesta, as well as studying the various craters, rock types, structural features, and think about how it formed. 

If you fancy it, there is a load of scientific literature available on all of Dawn's data. I recommend ScienceDirect or Google Scholar as an easy to find things to read, but just be warned that a lot of papers are behind a paywall, so you might only be able to access the abstracts or view it simply on the webpage. At the very least, take a look at NASA's website for the Dawn mission. There are loads of photos, nicely explained science, regular updates, and videos. 

Right. Back to my project.

Like I said, I'm using scanning electron microscopy (SEM) to study what each meteorite sample is made from in terms of elements, and then minerals. It's been good fun so far, but there's been a few problems too. 

Step 1. Sample Prep

Most of my samples came as thin sections - 0.03mm slices of rock stuck to a glass slide for use in microscopes. The benefit of thin sections is that they can go straight into the SEM after they've been coated in a thin layer of carbon and stuck down with copper tape, like this...

Some of my samples came as little chunks of rock like the one right at the start of this post. These ones have to be put into resin and polished by hand and by machine using various diamond pastes. This takes much longer than I'd like it to. Once they're all nice and shiny, the resin blocks are coated in carbon and can be used in the microscope.

Step 2. Data Collection.

Data collection is probably the easiest bit, actually. Driving the microscope is really good fun, and it's nice to see images and data in real time, rather than having to wait hours. You start off by finding an interesting looking area and spending what feels like 3 days of your life focusing the microscope. I'm using a JEOL 5001 FEG SEM, which can go up to over 1 million times magnification, although I rarely go about 850x. 

To start with, you get an EBSD image. This gives you a black and white picture of the sample, and can be used to look at texture and topography.

Different minerals show as different shades of grey, which is useful for the next stage of analysis.

Once you have your EBSD image, you wheel yourself across to the next computer to start analysing the composition. I'm using software called AZtec, which is only occasionally infuriating. Anyway, once you tell it to start mapping the area you've selected, you end up with something like this...

And yes. The colour schemes will always be hideous.

From there, you can run all the analysis you need to, and save several tens of gigabytes to your hard-drive and you're done! You can also make lots of spectral graphs, which are useful for telling you how much of each element there is.

Occasionally I get to run maps of the whole sample overnight or over the weekend which gives massive file sizes, but a really good representation of what your sample looks like. This is one of Millbillillie, which I affectionately refer to as Millie.

I got lucky with the colour scheme on that one. Never been able to replicate it.

Step 3. Analyse that shit!

Right. You've got your images and your data. You've exported it in every possible format. You've waited days for it to stick all the individual pictures together into one big picture. Good. Well done. Now it's time to make sense of all those numbers and spectra.

First things first, modal abundance. This is how much of each element there is in your sample. Now, AZtec will give you some numbers for this, but it's good to double check. You can do this in photoshop of all things. I downloaded a 30 day trial just to do this. It's highly frustrating and very bad for your eyes, but it seems to work well enough. As a bonus, sometimes you make really nice images that show certain things. For example, this one shows the texture of the sample really well. The stripey bits are caused by exsolution.

Spreadsheets are always fun. I have far too many of them now, but they are useful. The main thing I'm currently working on is identifying all the minerals that I've got spectral data for. I do this by looking at the ratios of different elements, and reconstructing them into formulas, and then into minerals. For example...

Now repeat several hundred times.

This is the stage I'm up to at the moment. 

Step 3. Write the damn thing.

We're given a guideline of 10,000 words, but also told that it should be suitable for a relevant publication. This means that some people will write 2 sides of A4, others (like me) will be writing up to 30 pages or so. 

Step 4. Presentation.

The final stage of my project is a small presentation to staff members about my project, and answering their questions. I'm probably the least stressed about this bit. I really enjoy presenting, and I really like my project. The key to a good presentation is being interested in what you're presenting.

So that's where I'm at. I've a few data sets that don't work properly - as in there are holes in the data and so on. That being said, I feel like I'm doing well and I'm on track at the moment. I struggle to get motivated sometimes, especially as I'm now just processing data and reading papers. I think it'll be fine.

4.6 Billion Years

I'm a geologist. Yeah. Rocks and stuff. Yes, I've heard that pun before. I've heard all of those puns before.

That's a pretty standard conversation with anyone who isn't a fellow geologist, although we do love a good rock-based pun. Today, I want to chat about why I love geology so much, and my independent research project that I'm currently working on. I'm a 4th year at university, and have moved from Earth-based geology to space. I study meteorites and asteroids now.

People often look down on geologists, and I had that from my own family, but often it is because they don't really know what we do and how much we know. What could be interesting about rocks, right?

I am constantly astounded by the world around me. We take so much for granted, but we are standing on a tiny ball of rock that is hurtling around the Sun which is in turn hurtling through space, and it has survived for 4.6 billion years. You can walk through landscapes and touch rocks that are older than mankind by millions of years. You can pick up a pebble that was there at the time of the dinosaurs. You can see ancient sea beds and volcanoes and rivers and life. You can reconstruct the past on a grand scale. You can see how our Earth has changed and developed, and you can imagine what it will look like in the future.

Geology is a wonderful tool of understanding. It teaches you to think in bizarre time-scales - where a million years is pretty damn fast - and you start to view the Earth as a complete system that has been working since long before we were here and will continue long after we've gone.

It's also great to study at university. It's a field science, so you get to go to different places, and you can learn from people that are equally passionate. We form incredibly strong bonds over pints in the pub and sheltering under trees on mountains. You'd be surprised how much fun you can have in the rain whilst standing next to an outcrop for scale.

I cannot imagine myself doing anything else. I love being able to see and understand the history of the world by walking through it. The Earth is old and it is beautiful. 

Right. Enough of that. Let's talk about space. 

Until May, I'll be working on an independent research project looking at using actual meteorite samples to discern rock-types on an asteroid some 251 million km away from Earth. I think that's pretty cool. I'll be using a Scanning Electron Microscope (like a normal microscope but uses electrons rather than light, and can detect elements) and data sets from NASA's Dawn probe. The asteroid I'm studying is Vesta - the 4th asteroid to be discovered. I'll write a post about Vesta at some point because it is really interesting, and we have some stunning images of it now.

I had never expected to turn to planetary geology, as this is, but I have always been fascinated by space. I suppose it isn't all that surprising really. In geology, we can see millions and millions of years of history. In planetary geology and space science, we can see billions. Studying meteorites and asteroids give us a window into the early Solar System (and it means you get to touch something that is 4.6 billion years old and came from millions of miles away). This area of research is very much curiosity-driven, which is no bad thing. We live in an extraordinary place, and it is only natural that we want to know more.

I'm so happy to have the opportunity to do this research now. Perhaps I should have chosen a project that would put me inline to work in industry, but this is a chance I might never get again. I had never thought I'd have to carry 10 different meteorite samples with me to university, let alone spend all my time studying them and trying to draw new conclusions and ideas. 

I guess the main thing that I want you to take away from this is that it's OK to choose to do something because it's fun. It's OK to be passionate. It's OK to be a little weird in the eyes of others. Your interests are valid, and it's your life to do with what you want. If it's something that you want to do, then do it. It is better to try than to spend your life regretting it. This applies to so many things. 

Be enthusiastic. Be passionate. Be interested. Be amazed and search for things that will stun you with awe.