As usual, I somehow find myself in the middle of fall, wondering where the time has gone. Here’s the highlights of the past few months:
1. The Midcoast Maine Girls Who Code club finished their inaugural year (see my earlier post to find out more about the club). Check out their finished website here: http://midcoastgirlswhocode.site/
2. GNATS had it’s 20th year and 200th trip across the Gulf of Maine. A summer intern from Colby College made a great video about it:
3. We visited Scotland for my sister’s wedding, then came straight back to Maine for our friends’ wedding.
4. I was a laboratory instructor for the Changing Oceans Colby Semester at Bigelow. This year, we wanted to teach the students some computer programming for plotting their data and doing analysis. I developed and taught a few labs using R which meant I had to teach myself it first… I am more of a Python girl. I also got to join the students on a field trip to Allen Island in Muscongus Bay. It is a private island owned by a Wyeth family foundation, and has a small museum and gallery of some of Andrew Wyeth’s paintings. It was a great trip: evening plankton tows, daytime marine debris surveys, limited internet, Scottish sheep, and a lecture about the Gulf of Maine by my colleague as the sun sets (see the picture at the top of the page).
5. The Bigelow Science Symposium was held at the start of October. This year it was the turn of the postdocs and a few colleagues from Colby to share their research. It was interesting to hear what everyone is working on, especially as there are so many new postdocs since the last one!
6. Some of my recent work was accepted to be published. I have been working on a way to estimate how much light is absorbed and scattered in the Gulf of Maine using measurements of the colour of the water (more on this in a later post).
7. The Girls Who Code club started up again. On the first day of the club, two of the girls told us they wanted to learn more of the coding for building the website (yay!), so we have been learning HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I am really enjoying it because I am learning something new at the same time as the girls, so we all work together. Sometimes they figure things out first and show me what to do, sometimes it is the other way round. For this semester’s club, the girls decided to make a recipe website – keep a look out for future updates on our progress!
8. We moved house.
9. I attended the Ocean Optics XXIV conference. It is always a great conference, and this year was no exception. I got to catch up with some old friends I haven’t seen in a long time. I got to hear lots of interesting talks. I got to have good conversations about all aspects of marine optics. I got to share my science. I got to visit Dubrovnik and swim in the Adriatic.