Adventures in Stony Brook: a mid-summer reflection

Day 20: An Update

To all of my (nonexistent) readers wondering where I’ve been in the 2 months since my last post, today officially marks the halfway point of the Simons summmer research program at Stony Brook University, where I’ve been researching geoscience since July 1st. Since I’ve arrived here, I’ve come to find out that a non-insignificant amount of people here have read my blog post, so if you’re one of those people I hope you’ll enjoy what you’ll read next (hi faye and canela).

Just for some initial thoughts before I expand, over the past 20 days, I feel like I’ve grown a lot as not just a researcher but also a person. I’ve met some of the most intelligent, hard-working, and kind people here, and I can’t wait to find out what they do in the future. I’ve had my fair share of ups and downs, but so far I’d say this is one of, if not the best experiences I’ve ever had in my short life.

Research

Firstly, since Simons is a research program first and foremost, I wanted to address the elephant in the room—research. For the past 3 weeks, I’ve been working under Dr. Weisen Shen in the Stony Brook Department of Geosciences. Weisen’s specialty is in geophysics, specifically seismic tomography. What that means is he uses seismic signals collected from earthquakes or ambient noise in order to model the structure of the earth. Currently, I’ve been working on a project that uses ambient noise collected from the South Pole region of Antarctica to model its shear velocity structure. We plan on using this shear velocity model to later on create a model of the geothermal heat flux of the South Pole, which is an important boundary constraint for the movement of the Antarctica ice sheet which covers 98% of the continent. While the end goal sounds nice for now, I’m still a long ways from getting there, but I think I’m making good progress. Hopefully I’ll be able to finish the first step, which is finding the phase and group velocity of travelling surface waves, as well as begin inversion to find the shear velocity structure by the end of the summer.

Almost all of the work I do is computational in nature, which marks a big change from the research I did before at Stony Brook last summer. However, I feel like a lot of my experience working with GNSS and STEVE, especially coding in IDL and python as well as using the SPEDAS library, with BU CSP has prepared me to do well. In many ways, I’ve come to realize that both GNSS and seismic tomography use similar techniques: for example, both use data from different stations that are collecting signal data that is constantly being emitted from the atmosphere and geosphere respectively. Both signals are modulated by the medium they propagate through: the crust and upper mantle for seismology and the ionosphere/atmosphere for aeronomy. I’ve also learned a lot more about signal processing and geophysics as a whole through this project, which has greatened my interest in studying geophysics in college as well.

Our working space is also pretty nice. Housed in Stony Brook’s Earth and Space Science building, our third-floor computer lab consists of 10 desks on the outer walls and 1 big table in the middle, with 3 cubicle-like offices on the left. There’s 3 windows on the far well that let in a fair bit of natural light, although at times the offie does give off solitary-confinement vibes. Connected to the lab is our break room, which consists of a high table with a hidden cabinet underneath. Within the cabinet contains our holy grail, the ramen stash, which we regularly replenish and consume with the likes of Buldak Curry, Buldak Carbonara, Buldak Quattro Fromaggio, and other random instant ramens purchased from Zheng’s Asian Market near the train station. The break room is also connected to the meeting room, consisting of a big table and a large TV screen where our lab group holds our meetings. Overall, despite our lack of any seriously impressive scientific equipment, I still love our lab for its homey, comfy vibes.

However, while lab work typically consists of just sitting around and coding, I’ve come to really love my lab and lab mates. In our embarrassingly long 2-3 hour lunch breaks, we’ve enjoyed our fair share of ramen (including the painfully spicy Buldak 2x ramen) and adventures. Our graduate student mentors are also really knowledgable and entertaining. H——, who primarily answers my questions about coding, is a Genshin/Honkai/Stardew Valley fiend and always has a her iPad open on WeChat or a game. T– is also great, even though me and my lab partner once had to leave our comfortable lab chairs to spend 5 hours in the hot summer sun washing and cleaning the seismic nodes our lab just got back from deployment in East Africa. I’m really grateful that H—— and T– put up with our lab’s antics, including filming TikToks while “cleaning” and long yap-sessions in random offices. Weisen is also very chill, and the nice part is that he’s always around the office if we have any questions.

All told, I’m excited to see what happens next with my project. Our lab has been meeting every week on Friday and sometimes early in the week to check in on our progress, and at our last meeting on the 19th, I presented my charts of the frequency spectrum of the cross-correlation functions I had processed as well as a section chart of the stacked CCFs. Hopefully by the 2nd, when our posters and abstracts are completed, I’ll have enough to be proud of presenting.

Not Research

Although research has taken a pretty big chunk of my time, I’ve also spent, admittedly, much more time not working. In the past 3 weeks, I’ve gone on:

• A 4th of July (technically 3rd of July) trip to the beach, which was planned 30 minutes before the train left resulting in a mad dash to the train station.

• A later 4th of July (technically 3rd of July) trip to a random neighborhood, where fireworks were being launched at a block party???
• An actual 4th of July trip to the city, where we got huge pizza slices from a restaurant outside Columbia, where we infiltrated Columbia pre-college and took their ice cream, drinks, and bouncy houses, where my sock ended up keep on slipping down and I had to repeatedly take of my shoe to adjust it, where I bought a matching beer bear shirt from Pacsun in SoHo and ended up leaving it at the Chick-fil-a outside Penn Station, and where Dean lost a game against a chess hustler in Washington Square Park.
• A weekend trip to Stop & Shop, where I purchased a houseplant for the lab subsequently named Matthias, where we purchased ingredients to make 50 cookies in the dorm which ended up sitting in the basement for a week, and where the bus ditched us by deciding to not pick us up.
• A Friday trip to Huntington, where we walked 50 minutes from the train station to Huntington downtown, where we went to Catpurrcinos cat cafe and I made spiritual connection with a cat named Penelope, where we got way too expensive tacos at Tony Tacos, where we bought groceries at Stop and Shop and “walked” back to the train station in 30 minutes, where I left my phone in the train station rest stop and ran off the train 10 seconds before it departed to get, and where I sat for an hour with only a dead phone and a book of Nicholas Nickleby to keep me company.

• A Friday trip to Target, where I purchased a 24-inch Squishmallow of Azumaril and where I purchased materials to make tanghulu (still have not made it yet).

Additionally, I’ve made some new friends and have had some very interesting conversations on topics ranging from our family histories to the parental and custodial status of Babs the Blue Jay. Karaoke and movie nights are mainstays, as well as gym trips and late night convos. While I won’t list names, I’m especially grateful for the friends I’ve been able to open up to about extremely private and important topics. Some of my favorite moments with friends include karaokeing until 4 am, gagging on 2x Buldak ramen on the first day, baking cookies, and playing ping pong.

While this overview is far from being all-inclusive, know that I’ve truly met some of my favorite people since coming to Stony Brook. For any Simons (or Garcia) people reading this, know that if you’ve spent any time with me at all, I’m so grateful that you’ve blessed me with your awe-inspiring presence. For my friends, I’m grateful for you guys putting up with me and for the laughs, tears, and secrets we’ve shared.

Signing off, Richard

PS: While writing this draft, I’ve come to realize how important reflection is. The past few weeks have felt a like a continuous blur, and sometimes it feels like my thoughts and emotions are being put through a blender until I can’t feel anything anymore. However, putting things into words has made it just a little bit easier to separate my thoughts and emotions into discrete bits. Like a Fourier transform, I can turn the noise into the respective component frequencies, taking into account what each component indiviudally contributes to my overall experience. For anyone reading this, I advise you to also take some time, even if it’s not written, to reflect a little.