Home Office Zen

 

My desk at home! With my computer screen on my "Arabic Word of the Day" e-mail!

Hey geo-nerds! I've gotten a few questions about my office set up and, since it's Spring Cleaning season and I'm all about revitalizing spaces, I figured that I would talk about how I find my zen in a home office environment. I admit, it can definitely be hard to find focus in a place where there are often so many extractions, but with a little attention to detail you can create a zen-rich work place at home.

As you can see from the photo above, my desk layout is pretty simple and minimalist. I got my desk online on Amazon. My chair is from Target, but I couldn't find my original chair so I'd recommend this one from Stein Mart, and my lamp is from IKEA. I always like to start filling a space with white or neutral colors and then building from there with accents, like picture frames, wall color (my current wall is a mellow yellow!), carpet, and curtains. These are more budget-friendly options for my fellow grad school enthusiasts out there, but high-end style like this is available everywhere.

I had a Chinese-German friend in college who diligently adhered to feng shui, so learning from her, I actually found that following a few basic feng shui rules really helps create focus:

1.) Place your desk so that it is in sight of the rooms doorway. You should be able to move your head 90° or less to see the door. If you need to position the desk so that your back faces the door, hang a decorative mirror so that you can see the door from your desk!
2.) Add a plant or two!
3.) Keep your desk free of clutter. I have a mobile portfolio organizer that I just stick in the closet when I'm not working.
4.) Add pictures or imagery that inspires you or reminds you of the importance of your work. For me, it's photos of my research site in Chile.
5.) Make sure to decorate with a balance of both light and dark colors!

Good luck with your office! And feel free to share your personal tips for working at home in the comments below.

On Failure

Happy March, guys! I don’t know how many of you have managed to take a vacation lately, but I took Spring Break as a chance to recharge after a very hectic couple of weeks. I’ll talk about how to get great travel deals for a grad school budget soon, but in the mean time I’ll touch upon an important point that I think is great for every grad student, scientist in a cut-throat culture, or basically any person who takes on a challenging career. The big take-home message: Failure is not only inevitable, but it’s necessary. 

 

A shot during one of my sailing trips out in the Boston Harbor. Sailing has taught me a lot about navigating around and beyond mistakes.

I know this is a common message in a lot of popular graduation speeches (e.g. J.K. Rowling and Oprah Winfrey) but it’s important. We can’t celebrate success if we don’t embrace failure. You can argue that failure is an integral part of the human experience, and is just as important as success in any career and/or life journey. I’m talking about this now because I just received a “no” when I was really hoping for a “yes.” I am definitely bummed, but it’s nice to remind myself of how those icky “no’s” can be useful. Really, it’s all about perspective.

So, when we get a dreaded “no,” what are some guidelines we can use to find the hidden benefits? For simplicity, I’ll focus on career-defined failure, but I think a lot of the tenants in these guidelines can serve for any facet of life. Here are my thoughts on dealing with failure:

1.)   Don’t let the “no” define you. Perhaps you didn’t get the result that you wanted, even after so much effort, but that doesn’t mean that either you or your work is subpar. This is just one “no” out of a series of “no’s” and “yeses” that you’ll receive in your life. Just one “no” is not enough to decide the value of your effort, so don’t let it affect how hard you try in the future.

2.)   Statistics are always in your favor. No matter how much you fail, every time you try gets you one step closer to a success. It’s like playing the lotto, except your chances are better. Do a quick exercise: in one category of trying (e.g. applying to graduate school), how many tries ended up in success? Twenty-five percent? Ten percent? Five percent? If the answer is yes, then congratulations! Your odds are a lot higher than the lotto! And all it takes is four, or ten, or twenty times to get what you want! I love playing the lotto, but I love the chances of success even more, so don’t let one number in your statistics bring you down.

3.)   Embrace the negativity. Understandably, if you’ve worked really hard on something, you’re absolutely going to feel bad about a “no” after so much effort. Not everyone agrees with me on this, but I personally think that it’s great to embrace that upset because those feelings of disappointment are valid. That being said, it’s important to be gracious to yourself and move on after acknowledging those feelings. For me, moving on could mean crying it out, going for a walk, or grabbing a drink with friends or family.

4.)   Talk about it. Don’t be ashamed of any failure you receive in your career. Be open to discussing the difficult moments because it will help you process and connect with peers and mentors.

I hope this was a helpful read! Feel free to share strategies in the comment section below!

¿Qué pasó con las Lagunas?

Hope you all had a lovely holiday season so far! I’m in Kentucky visiting family, and I’ve been really enjoying just relaxing. Anyway, since I’ve finished a section of my prospectus, I figured I would share a bit more on my research focus for all of you who are interested.

Photo taken by my advisor of a transitional pool looking southeast towards the Andes.

Lately, I’ve been really fascinated with the lagoons that are located in Salar de Atacama (SdA). Here’s a quick refresher: SdA is a basin in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, which is the driest nonpolar desert in the world and is therefore a great place to study groundwater dynamics in arid regions. SdA is also the home of the densest naturally occurring brine, which is water that has a lot of dissolved halite (i.e. salt) and other compounds that make it denser than fresh water. My general interest is defining the factors (like evaporation, dissolution, and changes in the hydraulic gradient) that drive groundwater flow in brine-rich and arid environments which, as I’ve mentioned in a previous post, are unique from mechanisms seen more temperate climates. 

Eastern view of Lagunas Miscanti and Miniques, looking towards the east at the Andes. Photo courtesy of my advisor!

I think that the lagoons are the key to studying those factors further. Why? Because the lagoons are located along the boundaries of SdA’s surrounding mountains and the basin’s halite nucleus, which is basically a giant chunk of salt that has accumulated in the valley floor of the basin from tens of thousands of years of evaporation. The lagoons are also located along the transition zone between the relatively fresh groundwater and the brine. These lagoons are only slightly briny, whereas the groundwater under the halite nucleus is incredibly briny (in fact, it’s likely the heaviest brine naturally found anywhere in the world). This means that the lagoons are likely being recharged from relatively fresh water coming from the uphill Altiplano region in the Andes. So, these lagoons and the area around them are a great place to study the processes by which freshwater turns into such heavy brine.

Flamingos depend on the algae and the crustaceans that live in the lagoons. Photo courtesy of my advisor.

So how can I study the lagoons and the areas around the lagoons to figure out how this brine develops? One good way is to delineate the extent of the brine and to figure out where the groundwater becomes so concentrated with dissolved sodium and lithium. A lot of work has already defined the lateral extent of brine, but the vertical extent of the brine is still poorly defined. There are also a lot of insightful techniques for tracing groundwater flow by studying changes in temperature, isotope ratios, and dissolved lithium and sodium. I’ll make sure to explain each tracer in more detail later on.

So, based on what we know, it looks like the lagoons are responsible for generating some of the densest brines on earth. Why? The extremely high evaporation rates extract water out of the lagoons and leave behind the dissolved compounds like sodium and lithium to create the denser brine, which eventually sinks down and into the rest of the brine that underlies the halite nucleus. The lagoons are likely the only place for this process to occur because the surface of the halite nucleus acts like a barrier against evaporation with almost no porosity and a very high albedo.

Here’s a little peak into my progress! Let me know if you have any questions, and Happy New Year!

Not all groundwater flows downhill

Happy Sunday! To start off the new week, I have some delicious tidbits on my research for you. This past Monday, I went with my advisor and another grad student to Worcester Polytechnic Institute for the NSF-sponsored Water Workshop. I presented a poster on my work, so I figured I’d talk about the details of my research focus a bit more.

Standing next to my poster for the Water Workshop at WPI!

Everyone agrees that water flows downhill. But does groundwater always flow downhill? That is, does groundwater flow always follow the topography? Not necessarily. Many people before me have proved that the groundwater table does not reflect the topography for a lot of aquifers. This depends on a lot of things, including recharge, depth of the groundwater table, the height of the aquifer, and the extent of the watershed. Strangely enough, not a single one of these factors dominate whether groundwater in an unconfined aquifer flows contrary to topography. They rather work together at different intervals to create this counter-topography behavior. And someone (i.e. me?) could spend a whole career investigating how all those factors affect one another to produce this affect.

It turns out that this behavior, which we call recharge-controlled flow, happens in a lot of places around the world, including parts of Massachusetts. More commonly, you see recharge-controlled flow in arid regions like the southwestern United States and my current study area, the Atacama!

Corenthal et al. (2016)

What’s going on in the Atacama, the world’s driest nonpolar desert, is really fascinating. Figure A is a conceptual illustration that shows how the groundwater table flows under all these high peaks to reach the salar, which is a salt flat. Based on what my research team and I know, the factors controlling groundwater flow in the Atacama include recharge (or rather, lack thereof) and the depth of the groundwater table from the surface.

The lack of recharge in Salar de Atacama as the world’s driest nonpolar desert means that its groundwater needs to come from somewhere else. That somewhere else is the relatively wetter, higher elevation peaks that we call the Altiplano (i.e. “high plains” in Spanish). This difference in recharge over time creates a difference in hydrologic head that causes the groundwater to defy all the topographical peaks in the Altiplano to flow towards Salar de Atacama.

Since Atacama is so dry, this groundwater flow creates a negative water balance equation as it continues to flow from areas with little precipitation to areas with almost no precipitation at all. In other words, more water is leaving the system than coming in. Because of this imbalance, the groundwater table probably continues to lower. As a groundwater table lowers, it becomes less dependent on the topographic variations.

This behavior has a lot of interesting and concerning implications. Atacama’s groundwater, which is the area’s only source of water, is nowhere near sustainable. This point is really important for the people and businesses that depend on this water. Plus, since groundwater takes a long time to travel, the distance that the Atacama’s water has travelled means that it is incredibly old. It’s probably on the order of thousands to tens of thousands of years old!

Well, here’s a quick taste of what I’ve been focusing on this semester. I promise I’ll talk about it more soon!

Spray-painting: the Grad Student’s Ultimate Furniture Refurbishing Tool

Happy September, you guys! We’re getting closer to autumn weather, which for me up here in New England means fresh, crisp air and crunchy leaves for me to stomp while I walk around campus. For a lot of student (including me) it also means moving into new spaces and finding furniture. I’m a big fan of inexpensive, reused furniture, so I figured I would talk about my new favorite thing to do on the weekends, which is spray paint!

 

As a student on a budget, it’s now my go-to method for changing an outdated wooden piece into a fresh, stylish addition. Last week, for example, my housemate and I found this table and this magazine rack in need of some TLC at the Salvation Army.

I had a vision of painting the table white as our new coffee table, and the news rack with with a gold accent on the slats. So on a sunny day I took both of them outside, cleaned each of them thoroughly, and sanded the table down (it had a super thick varnish on it). Then I put one even layer of white paint both on the table and the news rack. I think the most important thing to remember is to get as even of a layer, and wait about ten to fifteen minutes between each layer to let it dry and set just a bit.

The gold slats were the hardest thing. I had to cover all the other parts with painting tape and paper towel.

But, in a weird feat, I engineered my paper towel contraption so that the gold (mostly) ended up on the slats.

So I would highly recommend spray painting as a cheap way to “refurbish” a piece of wooden furniture. If you’re interested in trying it out, I have a few tips: try to spray on a day with low humidity, only spray outside with lots of ventilation, and make sure to paint on either grass or a completely covered surface. Good luck to all you students with the beginning of the school year!

Using the Market Skills I Learned in Jordan to get Groceries on a Grad School Budget

My latest trip to Boston's Haymarket.

Hope you guys had a lovely weekend! I had a really good time this weekend chilling with S, plus some family and friends. I also did a bit of prep work for grad school living, including going grocery shopping, and I figured I would talk a bit about how I've used my market shopping skills that I learned in Jordan to get healthy and tasty groceries on a budget. 

As an amateur foodie, I decided to kick the students-only-eat-ramen trope to the side (though do I love Korean ramen)! I decided instead to focus on cooking all my food at home and getting healthy ingredients to fuel my grad school days. It's tough to get by on a grad school budget, but I'm finding that with a little effort and planning I can eat well on less than $50 a week. 

A big part of such thrifty eating comes from going to the most cost effective food sources, including surplus produce markets like Haymarket in downtown Boston. 

If you've ever been to Haymarket or any market like it, you might feel like you're stepping into a different country, where vendors are calling out specials, customers are haggling over prices, and a few special carts will give you a good deal if they like you. It's this relationship-first mentality to shopping that I learned to love in Jordan. 

In Jordan, there were more little grocery shops where the veggie guy would personally get to me, ask how my studies were going, and give me an extra banana as a treat. I missed these interactions a lot when I returned to the U.S., where all I got was seemingly overpriced food that I paid an often bored and unhappy cashier for. 

So, at Haymarket, I get to prioritize people over capitalism, even though the market is an example of capitalism at its finest. It's also conveniently the cheapest way to get all my fruits and vegetables! I pay less than $20 for all the fresh produce I need to make two weeks worth of meals. It may take a bit more time than going to the grocery store and getting all the groceries I need in one place, but for the maybe half hour of extra time I'm essentially paying myself in all the savings I'm keeping. 

I'm talking about a gritty, no-frills surplus food market, not an organic farmers market, as much as I love those too. While farmers market are equally as pleasant and often reasonably priced, you will probably not get the overall discount that you're looking for. 

So here are a few tips for going to the market:

1.) Bring cash. Probably few people will have debit card machines.

2.) Don't be afraid to ask for a lower price. The worst thing they could do is say no. But remember to ask with a smile.

3.) Return regularly to build relationships - and maybe even get a few "preferred customer" discounts!

4.) Walk around the whole market before you buy anything. A lot of vendors sell similar products, so taking a quick walk around will give you a better idea of what produce is the best quality for the best price. 

5.) Keep a record of the prices to get an understanding of how they fluctuate through the season. I'm not good at mental notes, so I have a little note on my phone where I write the lowest price I've paid for each fruit or veggie. It's really helpful to get an idea of whether something is getting a little too pricey and I maybe need to change my eating habits slightly, if only for a few months!

Good luck and enjoy!