Blog 10 - Interview 2 Reflection

Around a week ago, my mentor started his new job at the John D. Cooper Center in Santa Ana.

1. Please explain how you are spending your mentorship time (Is it at a workplace or somewhere else?  Are you shadowing?  Are you able to do tasks that are meaningfully related to the topic?  If so, what?  Are there other people who are experts in the location?  Etc...)

- Lately there's been a massive change with my mentorship and because of this, I haven't been able to attend. More specifically, my mentor got a new job at a paleontological research center in Orange County, so going to his work place is out of the question for me, its just too far. However, I am working with him to set up days during the weekend where I can go over to his home, volunteer together with him at the San Bernardino County Museum, or whatever else we think of. Most of the time at mentorship though, I clean fossils, which is relevant to paleontology because it is the basic type of evidence that a paleontologist uses so in that sense my mentorship is very meaningful. Also, because my mentor and I would be able to work on fossils at his home, I am going to have the opportunity to perhaps actually get to analyze completed fossils (fossil cleaning takes so long so analysis doesn't normally come until much later after the fossil is completely cleaned).

2.  How did you find your mentor?  How did you convince this person to help you?  

- I actually planned ahead for senior project. The story goes like this: one day during the summer before junior year, I realized that I was woefully behind on my community service hours so I began looking to see if there were any museums near my home that I could possibly volunteer at. I grew to like the idea more and more realizing where there's a museum there's probably a curator of paleontology so I searched and searched and I eventually found the San Bernardino County Museum. I signed up to be a volunteer in the Education department in the hopes that one day I would have a chance to meet their curator of paleontology, Dr. Eric Scott. As luck would have it, I came just in time because a few months later the museum opened up a hall of geology which contained a volunteer run fossil cleaning lab that was overseen by Dr. Scott, so in the subsequent training session to learn how to safely clean fossils, I met my future mentor: Dr. Scott. When the time to get a mentor came around, I sent an email to him (in the time between when he became my mentor and when I first met him, I was involved in a few museum events with Dr. Scott), which practically begged him to be mentor, and he agreed to be mentor and better yet he was even excited to start.

3. How would you rate your comfort level with your mentor at this point in your relationship?  How does this relate to the time you've spent so far at mentorship/with this person.

- I feel quite comfortable around Dr. Scott. He's a very funny and kind person, which makes being comfortable really easy to do. So far, I think that the time I've spent with Dr. Scott has been indicative of my relationship with him because during my summer mentorship I've spent large increments of time around him as a shadow and also for cleaning fossils which has shown me his character and I've come to be very happy to have found such a great person to be my mentor.

4. What went well in this interview?  Why do you think so?  What do you still need to improve?  How do you know?  How will you go about it?

- This time around, I think that I asked better questions to my mentor, because I think that with the amount of information about his current status and background that they got me,  I can confidently say that he is an authority in paleontology. As for improvement, I really need to work on my in-interview conversation skills, because, like my first interview, I tended to just sit there and listen to my mentor speak. I know this because this whole interview was pretty much just my mentor speaking and it was very easy to notice that I barely guided the interview. For next interview, I'm going to listen to the other interviews of my peers so that I can perhaps pick up on a few tips to guiding my interviews.

To listen to my full interview pleas click here.

Blog 9 - Advisory Prep 3

This is both a hilarious and a prime example of dinosaur giving advice. By the way, dinosaurs aren't extinct. They're everywhere! Birds are the last branch of this family of animals; birds are specifically known as avian dinosaurs. The ones we think of, like T. Rex and Triceratops, are called non-avian dinosaurs.

I know this has nothing to do with this blog so the next picture will have everything to do with it.

1. State whether or not you currently have a mentor, and what the status of your interview is with that person.

- Currently, I still have my mentor, Dr. Eric Scott. Regarding interview 2, I'm still trying to coordinate a date with him for it.

2. At this point, your research is probably guiding your studies toward more specific areas within your topic.  Name the area or two you find most promising and explain your reasons.   

- So far, the one area of Paleontology that is beginning to grow on me is Paleoecology, more specifically the reconstruction of paleoenvironments. Paleoecology is the paleontological sub field that aims to reconstruct the entire ecology, meaning everything from food webs to organism interaction, using the evidence given by fossils and the matrix they are found in. The main reason why I'm starting to like this part of paleontology is the fact that I want to be able to reconstruct the world of any dinosaur from their perspective, but in order to do that I need to be able to put together who their world worked in the big picture. It is like the old phrase of "putting yourself in someone's shoes" to get to know who they are and why they do what they do. To be able to accurately render a dinosaur's life, or any other ancient creature, a paleontologist has to understand the context in which they lived: what other organisms were around, what type of biome did it live in, etc. So long story short I'm beginning to lean towards the paleontological sub field of paleoecology for my project because it would impart a great deal of understanding of how an ancient creature's life was like.

3. What kinds of sources do you think will help you in the next month to gain more research depth?  Where will you go to get them?

- Honestly, I've been exploring the Cal Poly Pomona Library database like crazy for articles about paleoenvironments or even how some fossils can reveal a lot about what an ancient environment was like, so I'm not sure how I can get more specific than that. However, one thing that would be really nice is if I can find a source where the study focuses on the reconstruction of a specific organism as a whole within its ecological context; such a source, would give lots of insight as to what I need to be studying. One place I can look for this might be the research help desk at Cal Poly, I just need to set aside the time to look for that one guy that showed us the Cal Poly database. Additionally, I think that there is probably a documentary out there that tries to do this so it'd be helpful to find a database of those.

4. Write down a possible EQ.  Please don't worry about wording other than ensuring that it provides the option for multiple correct answers.  At this point, the senior team is most interested in understanding your thought process.

- What evidence is most useful when a paleontologist attempts to reconstruct an organism and its ecological context?

Blog 8: Independent Component 1 Proposal

Only in my case, I will just leave them where I find them. Kind of sad isn't it. Darn you Department of the Interior (shakes fist angrily in the air).

1.  Describe in detail what you plan to do for your 30 hours.

- For my independent component, I plan on attending Gem-O-Rama in Trona California (it’s the event Mr. Holt talked to us about). Specifically, I plan on attending the morning events of Gem-O-Rama. The first morning event takes place Saturday morning and is called the "Mud Trip" where attendees dig through mud to find crystals of hanksite, trona, and borax; following the ending of that event, my plan is to visit the Trona Pinnacles where I plan to hike and hunt for fossils or possibly other types of minerals for the rest of the afternoon. On Sunday morning, I want to go to the "Pink Halite" event of Gem-O-Rama and then depart once again to the Trona Pinnacles in the afternoon; however, this time I will be there for less time, since the next day is school. After the trip, I plan on writing a paper about the viability of there being fossils at the Trona Pinnacles and what kind of environment these natural landmarks suggest ancient organisms lived in; this paper will later be peer reviewed and I will post the final draft on my blog as a google doc share-able link.

2.  Discuss how or what you will do to meet the expectation of showing 30 hours of evidence.

- To show evidence of my work, I plan on taking various pictures of myself doing the activities I just described, except the paper. I'm also entertaining the possibility of uploading several video logs of my daily progress and posting these videos as links on my blog, but I wish for the senior team to give me their opinions about that idea. For the research paper, I plan on posting a separate resources log into my working bibliography and on posting my pre-edited version of my paper as well as my final draft on my blog.

3.  Explain how what you will be doing will help you explore your topic in more depth.

- For the most part, the events I will participate in Gem-O-Rama closely reflect several parts of the acquisition of fossils. For example, the "Mud Trip" event parallels the jobs of excavators at the La Brea Tar Pits, who treat the fossils they find with specific chemicals to safely remove them from their surrounding matrix, since you also have to specifically use brine to remove the mud from the crystals without causing them harm. Also, the "Pink Halite" trip closely resembles the act of finding fossils in the field since Paleontologists need to keep a sharp eye out to find an exposed part of a fossil and it also shows the fact that you have to know where fossils to can be to even find any because if you recall the video Mr. Holt showed then one can see that the people looking through the salt flats were obviously going to find nothing. In short, the "Pink Halite" trip would help me see how useful knowing where fossils can be and being observant of the ground can lead to great finds and in the case of this trip, that find would be crystals in the stream Mr. Holt showed us. The trips to the Trona Pinnacles would help me explore my topic because I would literally look for fossils, which makes me apply my knowledge of what types of rock would host fossils and it would make me keep an observant demeanor to spot exposures. However, I won't be collecting the fossils I find since the land where the Trona Pinnacles are located on prohibits the extraction of fossils. The only artifacts I will take are any rock samples within the vicinity of the fossil that I could possibly use to uncover the type of environment that the fossilized organism lived in.  Furthermore, I will notate measurements of, observations of, and locations of any fossils I find on my trip which would reflect the field journal that most Paleontologists keep. In addition to the trips, the research paper would help me gain a deeper understanding of Paleontology by putting me in a position where I have to do both a fact based and observation based analysis of the Trona Pinnacles in terms of the topics I stated earlier. Overall, these activities would help me explore Paleontology more deeply by helping me explore what aspect of a Paleontologist’s work I would like to direct my overall project towards.