ichnia

I totally forgot to put this on my livejournal! I'm kind of failing at this whole record-my-grad-school-experience-in-a-journal thing. I blame facebook for making me lazy.

I was on Canada's Discovery Channel 4 weeks ago! Exciting!
I mean, I was just in the background, and I didn't get a microphone or anything... but my adviser did say my name out loud! "Sara, come here, come and see some of your fossils!" XD
Pretty cool, I think. My first brush with the media. :)

http://watch.discoverychannel.ca/featured-/daily-planet---march-30-2010/#clip283229

So I have this idea, and I'd love to get some input on it!

I'm thinking of starting a sort of a sort of a youtube vlog. I hate the word vlog... umm.. video series? About cool topics in paleontology.

There are all kinds of great reasons for this.

-- For one, I need to overcome my camera phobia. With a media-friendly adviser like mine I am probably going to find myself on TV sooner or later. I want to welcome the opportunity instead of being petrified like I would be if it happened tomorrow!

-- I am a BIG fan of popularization of good science. And there is so much FREAKING COOL stuff in paleontology that I just want the whole world to know about. Dinosaurs get all the buzz (and they'd get their share of screen time) but there's so much other awesome stuff out there!

-- I love to teach about paleontology. I want to make a career out of it, so I'd better! This will be great practice. And a great discover what catches people's interest and what doesn't.

-- It will also make me research all kinds of random topics in paleontology, instead of getting tooo lost in my thesis, and ending up with too narrow a repertoire. If one week I talk about synapsids, and the next week (2 weeks? month? who knows how often I'll have time for these) I talk about crinoids, after awhile I'll have a nice, broad knowledge base.

-- Plus I'll naturally acquire some video editing skills. Can't hurt!

-- If I get good at this, it could be GREAT on a resume when I start applying for professor jobs someday.


So yes, that's the goal! Anyone have any experience with video editing who could point me in the right direction of how to get started?? Will need software to put together video of me talking and images and probably subtitles and visual effects.. all kinds of stuff. I think it'll be fun though!

Would you watch this, if I keep it from being too technical? I think it'll be fun and interesting trying to strike that right balance between educational and entertaining. It's going to be very outside my comfort zone, but that's half the point!

Anyone have any input/suggestions?

Decided to cross-post this to my facebook too. ^_^

Thank you for the comments of support on my previous entry about my difficulty focusing. :)
I'm still struggling, but I've made an appointment with a counselor and I really think Jess might be on to something about the ADD/ADHD. Both my mother and my sister have been diagnosed with it, and I've always kind of scoffed at it, feeling like they just use it as an excuse. But it dawned on me just yesterday -- when do I find myself most able to focus? When I pull all-nighters and drink heavy amounts of caffeine. (I don't drink caffeinated beverages on a day-to-day basis -- just when I really need it.) And what is caffeine? A stimulant. And stimulants are what they prescribe for ADD.

I hate the thought of depending on meds to function, truly. But something as simple as taking a pill every day makes me write a better thesis and get more done in a more timely manner, well, it might just be worth it.

Heavily caffeinated right now and putting final touches on my first draft thesis proposal, by the way. ^_^

First gonna write another entry about something totally unrelated though...

I don't like who I am right now.
I'm going to start writing some brutally honest LJ entries and maybe that will kick start me to be better. I know I can be a lot better.

The last week, I've been procrastinating disgustingly on my thesis proposal. I LOVE my thesis topic. It is amazing and exciting and everything I want. It is not boring, not trivial, I'm ridiculously lucky to even have the opportunity to work on it and make my dreams come true.
But still I sit and waste hours at a time in front of my computer somehow doing absolutely nothing while the sadly incomplete word document sits open untouched.
WHY?

Partly it's just so intimidating. I have to get this right, and my adviser is in Australia and not responding to my emails asking for guidance.. but that's just an excuse. Mostly I'm just distracted and lazy, and I'm kind of hating myself for it.

I must get this done. I must be a person and a student I can be proud of.

Via Phayngula.
Had to save this!

How cool is this?!

For the first time ever, we know the COLOR of a dinosaur. (Ahem. A non-avian dinosaur as some would surely point out!)

Every seven-year-old asks the question about dinosaurs,"what color were they"? The answer has always been a discouraging, "we'll probably never know." But check out this reconstruction of 155-million-year-old Anchiornis huxleyi. Apparently, small traces of pigment were found in tiny fragments of fossil feathers. They compared these pigments under scanning electron microscope with pigments in the feathers of modern birds, and were able to determine the distribution of the pigments across the body.

After all the hundreds or thousands of artistic renderings of dinosaurs I've ever seen, this is the first one with color based on real science. Wow. It sends shivers up my spine just looking at it!

So maybe I'll start keeping up a journal again. I do miss it, having a record of my life to put things in perspective, to look back on later to reminisce and see how far I've come!

I'm on quite an adventure right now: Grad School. I'm in the first year of my master's in paleontology, doing exactly what I've wanted to do my entire life. I am astonishingly lucky that it's all worked out thus far. I've gotten the bulk of my course work out of the way, and in just over a week I'll be starting serious work on my thesis. After years of study and hard work, I've made it to this point -- doing original, publishable research and contributing to science. How cool is that??

I think when publish my first paper, that'll be the benchmark I've been waiting for, when I'll tell people not that I'm a paleontology student, but a paleontologist. It might sound like a silly distinction, but for me it's kind of a big deal!

Anyway, I'll try to keep this up to date, but my track record isn't very good! For now I've got to go grade like 90 lab assignments.