My Academic Journey: From a love of weather to a PhD in atmospheric sciences
I’ve been blogging since my grad school days and yet have never shared my complete academic journey! If you wanna know a bit more about me and my academic journey/background, this is the post for you. Warning: This post ended up being pretty long! Turns out I had a lot to say, haha.
You may know by now that I earned a PhD in 2017, and if you’ve been reading for a while, you’ll know I completed a Master’s before moving on to my PhD. Both of those degrees are in atmospheric sciences, which is basically meteorology with less of a focus on weather forecasting and with more courses on air quality, land-atmosphere interaction, climate, etc.
But, my academic journey started way earlier—when I was in elementary school!
On Wednesday, March 17th, I’ll be going LIVE on Instagram with Rebecca of PhD in Clothes to chat about all things grad school! Be sure to join us and ask questions!
From Elementary to High School
I started watching The Weather Channel every day after school when I was around 10 years old or so, and that basically kicked off my weather fascination. I absolutely fell in love with weather, which is saying a lot because I grew up in Boise, which has arguably the most boring weather. We have seasons, but we don’t get severe thunderstorms, we don’t get blizzards, and we definitely do not get hurricanes. (We DID have a significant earthquake last year—the first in many decades—but obviously that’s not weather related!)
For me, school came fairly naturally. I worked really hard in my classes and was able to squeak out many As through junior high and high school. I took Earth sciences in 8th grade, which included a section on meteorology, and absolutely loved it! (I really loved and still do love all the Earth sciences as well as astronomy!) One of my lowest grades was actually in biology; turns out, out of all of the sciences, I suck the most at biology. I hate it, haha! I was good at chemistry, and I was okay at physics. I was also decently good at math (but not geometry). I was fortunate to attend a private high school, which really helped prepare me for college.
The summer before my senior year of high school, I volunteered at the local National Weather Service office through an employee-turned-family-friend that I met at church. I was able to shadow various meteorologists during their shifts, and I completed a really small research-like project. I even got to select the high temperature forecast for a day! (Can’t remember how well I did, haha.) Many of the meteorologists I met when I volunteered over a decade ago are still working there now.
When it came time to apply for colleges, I applied for a bunch that had meteorology programs, and I almost went to the University of Utah but I didn’t receive enough scholarship money to cover out-of-state tuition as well as room and board. I ended up staying in Boise and attended Boise State, and I lived on campus in the Honors College dorm my first year (the new HC dorm is MUCH fancier than the dorm I lived in, haha).
Undergraduate: B.S. Geosciences
I started college immediately after high school, and I’ll be honest: I got a little bit caught up in all of the “newness” that college brought in terms of living in a dorm room with other students my age, hanging out with them at all hours instead of studying or sleeping…so my grades weren’t as good as they could have been that first semester. They weren’t terrible; I think I finished with mostly As, but I remember thinking I could have put a little more effort into those classes.
I went into college having already taken pre-calculus, but instead of taking Calculus I that first semester of college, I signed up for Business Calculus even though I didn’t need it. Worst. Decision. Ever. I don’t like to blame my professor but I put partial blame on him because math had always came naturally to me until that class. I literally had an F going into the final, and I think he curved my grade after the final exam so I finished with a C- and didn’t have to retake it. It killed my GPA, though. (That was the only C I got all of college, so I spent the rest of my time building up my GPA.)
Second semester freshman year, I took Calculus I and finished with over 100%. So, that’s why I put partial blame on my Business Calc professor, lol. Turns out I wasn’t terrible at calculus like I thought I was! After that I was back on track. Calc II and III were more difficult, with III being the most annoying. I loved Ordinary Differential Equations, and that was the first class I took where I went to regular office hours and studied with others in my class. I never realized the value of office hours until that class, and I highly recommend taking advantage of them whenever you can.
I started college with a major in environmental studies and then changed it to geosciences because the former was a Bachelor of Arts degree program and I wanted a Bachelor of Science instead. I planned to attend graduate school in meteorology/atmospheric sciences and needed science and math coursework. I selected an emphasis in hydrology since that was most similar to atmospheric sciences, and at the time it was also the most flexible in terms of coursework I could take to satisfy my degree. Because there weren’t many hydrology-focused courses, I filled my schedule with math courses and was able to satisfy my degree requirements AND earn a minor in applied mathematics.
The summer after my sophomore year, I started working for a geophysics graduate student on a research project involving icequakes, which is movement in glaciers that can be captured on seismographs like earthquakes. That was when I was introduced to coding in MatLab (bleh) and somewhat mundane graduate student life (haha). I attended my first academic conference, the AGU Fall Meeting, and presented that research as a poster.
After doing that, I had the opportunity to participate in a hydrology research project with a different graduate student, which was much more in line with my degree. I ran water samples that were collected in a nearby watershed through a machine that determined its naturally-occurring isotopes, and from those we could determine where the airmass that brought the precipitation originated.
I applied for graduate school fall of my senior year and received three offers: two were fully-funded graduate positions (one was more funding than the other) and one program admitted me with no funding. I visited the two schools that offered full funding.
I finished my Bachelor’s degree in four years (plus a summer spent studying abroad, which included taking an intensive Italian class; I took an art class online that same summer to knock those electives out). The last semester of college, I took Partial Differential Equations, which gave me my final applied math requirement and it was (supposedly) a requirement before entering an atmospheric sciences graduate program. THAT was a difficult math class; I really enjoyed the Ordinary Different Equations class prior and PDEs was nothing like it!
After graduating with my Bachelor’s, I interned with NASA before moving to start graduate school! (I applied to two summer internships, one with NASA and the other with NOAA, and I got into both. It was such a tough decision because the NOAA internship was more atmospheric sciences-focused, but I’m glad I ended up doing the NASA internship!) Most incoming graduate students started research over the summer prior to the start of the first classes and I’m glad I did an internship.
Graduate School: M.S. and Ph.D. Atmospheric Sciences
I didn’t take a break between undergrad and grad school; immediately after finishing my Bachelor’s, I interned with NASA, and then I started graduate school! I ended up at the University of Utah in the atmospheric sciences program on a full fellowship (salary + waived tuition), and let me tell ya: I felt like I knew nothing since all of my incoming classmates had at least a little bit of background in meteorology, and most had degrees in meteorology. I took one class in college, Intro to Meteorology, and that was it. Even though the concepts built off what I learned in math, chemistry, and physics, it will still difficult for me to grasp some of the concepts. The atmosphere is wild, let me tell you. LOL.
Oh, and I definitely didn’t need Partial Differential Equations even though it was listed as a required pre-requisite. Any time any PDEs came up in class, the professor would give us the answer. I’m not bitter about this at all… (But it did give me my applied math minor, so I guess it wasn’t all bad.)
We all had three required classes to take during our first year, but I also took an interdisciplinary class (required for my fellowship) and tacked on a couple more relatively basic meteorology classes since I didn’t get the basics that my classmates did.
At the conclusion of the first year, all of us incoming students had to take a Qualifying Exam to determine if we could continue on in our degree program. The goal was to at least pass the test—if you passed, you could continue on to complete your Master’s, and if you “high passed” (i.e. got a really high score), you could skip the Master’s entirely if you wanted and get your Ph.D.
Our Qualifying Exam was a two-day, four-hour long test with four questions each day, so you basically had an hour for each question. It was brutal. We studied all semester for that test, so it was a celebration when we finished.
Luckily, I passed! Whoop! My goal going into grad school was to get a Master’s. I honestly didn’t think I’d go on to get a PhD; at the time, I was still thinking I’d get a job at the National Weather Service, which technically didn’t require anything higher than a Master’s. (Everyone knows now that it’s extremely competitive and it seems more folks have PhDs than before.) I also wasn’t planning on teaching, so a PhD wasn’t really necessary.
The summer before I defended my Master’s, my advisor told me he had funding for a PhD student and asked if I would be interested. Honestly, I was scared at the thought of trying to find a job, but I did seriously consider whether getting a PhD would make me “overqualified” for what I wanted to do. (I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do, though.)
I ended up agreeing to stay on for a PhD, and in the fall 2 years after starting grad school, I defended my Master’s thesis. I didn’t get my final thesis to the thesis office until the spring after, though. Don’t get me started on thesis formatting. I spent way too much time crying over those stupid archaic requirements! Gah!
While I was working on formatting and submitting my Master’s, I got to work on PhD research. I changed topics slightly; my PhD research sort of built off of my Master’s (I believe I cited my Master’s journal article in my first PhD journal article). I knew that I didn’t want to be doing grad school forever (there were folks in my program that were there for 8-10 years!), and I ended up defending my PhD dissertation two years after submitting my Master’s thesis for a total of five academic years of grad school. At my Master’s graduation, I specifically wrote on my little info card that the department chair read aloud that I’d see everyone in two years for my PhD graduation, and he laughed!!! But I was right!
I scheduled my PhD general examination the fall after my Master’s graduation. The general examination is not a written test; it’s a dissertation topic and timeline proposal presented to your committee members with questioning at the end. It felt like a mini thesis/dissertation defense.
I defended my PhD dissertation a couple of weeks after graduation and was able to submit my dissertation to the thesis office literally the day before I moved back to Boise. My grad school colleagues were so kind to help me submit revisions!
I knew from the start that I didn’t want a career in academia, but other jobs in my field (even adjacent fields) were few and far between when I graduated in 2017. By a true miracle, because I only got an interview for this one job, I was offered a position and have been there ever since! My position didn’t include any meteorology whatsoever when I started, and now I am part of a team of meteorologists helping out when/where I can!
As far as publications go, I published three first-author journal articles: one from my Master’s thesis and two from my PhD dissertation. I published the second from my PhD the year after I started my job; luckily my advisor was able to handle most of the edits. I had a third I was preparing from my PhD and it never materialized… And actually, I think I was technically supposed to write four from my dissertation. (Oops.) Sometimes I still feel like things are unfinished, but I’m pretty sure the research was picked up by the next grad student! I try not to dwell on it…
Whew—that was a LOT! Thanks for hanging in there if you made it to the end!
Don’t forget! On Wednesday, March 17th, I’ll be going LIVE on Instagram with Rebecca of PhD in Clothes to chat about all things grad school! Be sure to join us and ask questions!