Great Book!

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~UG03/souls/defpg.html

Great Website!

Ok,

So if I accomplished nothing by moving to Juneau except getting to attend a class where one of my fellow fish students alerted me to the existence of this website, then I will still be assured that I made the right decision!

Take a look: http://www.badassoftheweek.com/

My favorites:

http://www.badassoftheweek.com/index.cgi?id=957432122363

http://www.badassoftheweek.com/index.cgi?id=808628531966

http://www.badassoftheweek.com/index.cgi?id=672138630154

http://www.badassoftheweek.com/index.cgi?id=97717212284

Funny music video

This has nothing to do with Juneau or my life, other than the fact that I got to see Arctic foxes on St. Paul Island in the Pribilofs this summer! But yeah:

http://videos.digg.com/post/60362146681/this-music-video-will-make-your-day

The Long Hot Summer is Drawing to a Close

Hello again to what is at this point most likely to be my mother or another family member. I pulled a standard move for myself, started this blog and then forgot about it after 2 posts! Well, not really. I was deployed at sea all summer on a scientific survey vessel in the Bering Sea, and the internet connections that were intermittently available to me were really just enough to check email.

I wish I could give more of an update right now, but I really just wanted to post something, before my friend drags me off to the "Rock Dump," the climbing wall complex in downtown Juneau. This is where all the insane mountain climbers in this town hang out to make sure that every activity they fill their day with is hardcore.

Needless to say, my huffing and puffing up the easy wall is a bit out of place at times, but hey! At least I don't have to wait my turn since no one really uses the easy wall!

More to come later or tomorrow, or in two more months!

Introductions

Hello All!

I am a first-year PhD student at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, at the School of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences (SFOS), in Juneau, AK. It is a complicated mouthful of a position!

I started at SFOS (pronounced "es-foss" by us insiders) last September, as part of a group of 6 students who all received funding from the National Science Foundation MESAS program (pronounced "may-sahs"). Another confusing set of acronyms go along with that whole deal, and more information can be found at: http://www.sfos.uaf.edu/mesas/

More information about us students (four years worth of funding recipients) and our research projects is at: http://www.sfos.uaf.edu/mesas/students.php

I meant to start writing about my MESAS experiences last fall, you know, when I first started the program, but of course this fell to the wayside of more pressing obligations...

So I have resolved to try to share some of my experiences with MESAS that have already gone by (like our three-week "summer course" last August, during which the program flew us all to Barrow!) and some that are just about to take place (like my required internship that begins mid-June, for which I will be sent out into the middle of the Bering Sea).

I hope that this is informative and interesting for everyone who reads it!

Greetings from Juneau!

                After a long winter, it appears that summer may finally be upon us up here in Juneau. It did snow during May, but that seems to be the last of it. This makes my 17 mile bicycle commute to school and back considerably easier…

                I just finished my second semester at the School of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences, through the University of Alaska Fairbanks. I had my first dissertation committee meeting, and all things are “go” for my project (analyzing the socio-economic effects of individual quotas for halibut in Alaska and cod in Poland). That means I will be on my way back to Poland to distribute a questionnaire to commercial fishers in the fall. But before that, I am looking forward to an exciting summer.

                All NSF-IGERT MESAS funding recipients (there are 6 of us this year) are required to do internships during our first summer on the fellowship, and I am lucky enough to have an advisor who recommended a really cool one for me: I will be a sea sampler with the International Pacific Halibut Commission, collecting biological data about Pacific halibut out in the Bering Sea.

                I just had a week of training in Seattle before returning to Juneau to attend the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council meeting (coming up after the weekend). Then it is off to Dutch Harbor until August. In August I will be doing some volunteer work restoring the Cape Decision Lighthouse, on Kuiu Island—I did that last year as well. Finally, our fellowship group will be meeting for our annual retreat in Nome at the end of August. I can’t wait!