tech review

I had my technical review yesterday. It went well, I think. For those of you who don't know the purpose of the technical review is to present your research to your committee ~6 months before your defense so that there are no surprises when you get to your defense. Usually it is a good experience and is your only opportunity to get your committee together to discuss your research, get feedback guidance, suggestions etc as to how to pull it all together. Usually the review is about 2 hours, mine was 3, but my friend's recently was 4. Two of my advisors ended up arguing for 30 minutes about whether clays exhist on Mars. It was kind of annoying because I study salts, not clays and I kept trying to pull the discussion back to salt and they kept going back to the implications for clays.Erg. Joe would have had a blast!

They gave me some good organizational advice and I have a lot of work to do in the next 6 months, but my committee seems to think I'm in good shape to graduate in December.

comment from joe:

Speaking of clays....I gave a colloquium style seminar at JPL this past week. I discussed the TES spectra of clay deposits...and unveiled the concept of deposits that are clearly Weathered (clay-bearing), but Thermally Faint. Or in short, these clay deposits that don't have good thermal signatures are WTF terrains. I thought it was funny, but you can guess how funny it was to the NASA crowd....