First Publications

I’m soon to be a published author! Woohoo! A couple weeks ago we found out that the journal article based on my Master’s research, and on which I’m the lead author, was accepted with minor revisions to the Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology! And most of the suggested revisions were truly minor, though a couple will certainly require some careful thought. We hope to be able to get the revised article sent back to JAMC this month, well ahead of the mid-May deadline. Assuming our revisions satisfy the reviewers and editor, then it’ll just be the waiting game for a few months until it’s officially published. It does feel good to have gotten back the review with only minor revisions, especially after an earlier version of the manuscript was rejected by an editor of another journal.
On Friday I took the Technical English Competency Exam, yet another requirement that the Department of Meteorology has installed for PhD students to pass before we’re even allowed to schedule our comprehensive exams. For it we have to submit a 500-word extemporaneous essay (which we completed in the class Meteo 580), submit a manuscript no longer than 4 pages in AMS Conference preprint format (so I turned in my AMS preprint from January, with a couple minor tweaks), and give a 12-minute oral presentation on our research. The faculty evaluators are notoriously picky about details in this exam, especially in the timed talk. For instance, going even a couple seconds over 12 minutes is a black mark, as is having small text on any slide, undefined acronyms, not talking about the axes/units on any graph shown, and including anything that’s not relevant to your central point. It’s good training, and I completely understand their desire to try to ensure that every person coming out of this graduate program is capable of concisely and coherently communicating their research, especially after seeing large numbers of simply bad talks at various conferences. So even though I’ve given plenty of presentations before, the exam was still a bit nervewracking, especially as I knew the 12-minute mark was looming imminently (I finished in 12:03 or so, I was on the last sentence of my conclusions when Dr Shirer stood up at 12:00, the signal for me to stop). And although I maybe packed a little too much info into the talk, or spent a little too much time on background (at the expense of results), I passed the timed talk portion of the exam! I won’t know about the results of the written portion of the exam for 2-4 weeks, but at least I won’t have to give the talk again. One more hoop has now been successfully jumped through. Woot.
And I don’t know if this should legitimately go under the category of “milestone” or not, but I finally created a CV (curriculum vitae) for myself on Monday. From scratch. I was applying for the College of Earth & Mineral Sciences Centennial Travel Research Award, and one of the requirements was a CV, and I didn’t have one. Not even a partial or an old one (I also don’t have a resume, not even an old one). After more than three and a half years in grad school, and with quite a few conference presentations and posters to my credit, I figured it was high time to start actually keeping track of all this information before it became any harder to remember or track down any of it. I suppose at some point I’ll get around to adding the content from my CV to my website.
Oh, and I’m soon to be a published photographer as well! A woman from Great Britain discovered my website and saw some of the photos I took of Te Papa Tongarewa, the National Museum of New Zealand in Wellington. She’s writing a book about Te Papa, and asked permission to use some of my photos! Which reminds me, I really need to get her that copyright form ASAP… I’ll post more details about the book when I have them and when this is a done deal. But how cool is that? Now I just need to figure out what the best way is to add that to my CV. 🙂