Science meets home-buying

Things have been busy in these parts. On top of the usual conference-preparation and paper writing, Brian and I are shopping around for a house to buy in Austin.

You don’t have to be smart to go to grad school

Probably the majority of grad students out there, especially ones who are a few years in, would agree that you don’t have to be all that smart to go to grad school. True, you have to be good enough at taking tests to have high enough scores to get into a school in the first place, but that’s about as “smart” as you need to be.

Intelligence helps you get along, of course, but after the admission process is over, anyone can make it through grad school if they put in the effort. And there is plenty of hard work to put in. In fact, you can’t even substitute being smart for being hard working. You still have to do the work in the end in order to succeed.

Longyearbyen, Svalbard

On the last day of the trip, we pulled back into port in Longyearbyen early in the day. We spent an hour or two at UNIS, the University Centre in Svalbard. Several groups presented their final projects from the week and we also heard a few of the UNIS faculty members talk about UNIS and their research. Following the presentations, we took a mini field trip to the UNIS carbon dioxide sequestration site.

Svalbard Glaciers

In addition to all the rocks we saw, there were also tons of glaciers in Svalbard.

Pyramiden, Spitsbergen

One day, we stopped in the nearly abandoned Russian mining town of Pyramiden. Named after pyramid-shaped mountains nearby, the town used to bustle with more than 1000 permanent residents. But it was abandoned in 1998, a few years after a terrible plane crash in Longyearbyen killed 141 on their way to the settlement.