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Ask me questions about my job?
I kind of want to be excitable at people about my work (and I kind of want the human contact without needing to actually parse audiovisual cues as required in in-person conversation), so... if you are curious please Ask Me Things? <3
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As for getting here -- so there's this awkward thing where I actually experience physical arousal in response to, well, anything that strikes me as especially beautiful or elegant, be it poetry or music or prose or science. And the point at which it became completely apparent that I Wanted To Science was in a GCSE chemistry lesson - I can't remember whether I was 15 or 16 - and we talked about the allotropes of carbon, that is, the different forms that pure elemental carbon can take. There's graphite (like you get in pencils) and there's diamond (obviously!), but there's a few others two (like graphene - a single sheet of graphite - and buckyballs/buckminsterfullerene, which is a ball-shaped molecule in exactly the pattern of edge-sharing pentagons and hexagons that a football has).
From there, I was pretty sure I wanted to be an organic chemist, working with carbon chemistry, probably in drug research & development (the thing I like most of all in chemistry is building up complex molecules from simple building blocks). I continued pretty sure of this all the way through sixth form (16-18). I mean, I knew I liked the outdoors and hiking - my mum's always been pretty outdoorsy; she grew up in rural Cornwall, and her mum grew up in the Alps, and hiking is a thing we've always done. And then I applied to university and specifically applied to Cambridge, because unlike most universities in the UK you take a broad base of courses in the first year of a science degree and narrow down from there (usually, you apply to a university to Do Chemistry, or Do Biology, or Do Physics, or Do Earth Sciences, and specialise down from there - in the Natural Sciences tripos, in my first year I took chemistry, geology, and material&mineral sciences). I had a bit of a fight to actually take geology - it's seen as an "easy option", so convincing my tutors that I was serious about it and should take it instead of physics was a bit of a struggle, but I managed!
And by the time I got to the end of my second year, and had to choose between one of chemistry and geology... well, chemistry at that level was for me about as intellectually satisfying as playing Su Doku: like, it's fun and you do get a small sense of "HAH, I did the thing", but it's not particularly engaging? This is in part because I am ludicrously good at organic chemistry: it's a field where to some extent either you have an instinct and you look at reaction schemes and Just Get It, or you have to memorise a bunch of rules about what governs chemical reactions, and then every single specific reaction you learn about is an exception to the rules. I am very firmly in the former group, to the extent that I was able to help one of my housemates with her chemistry homework through most of her third year despite the fact I'd never taken the courses she was doing and was working purely off instinct. (There are also quantitative measures of how ridiculously easily org chem comes to me, but I don't think it's necessarily helpful or relevant to describe them.)
Geology, on the other hand... geology I don't get like that. I have to work at it. But in working at it - in the field trips - I realised how much I enjoy the challenge, how much better I feel for trying to wrap my head around difficult stuff. And then there's also the bit that over the course of those field trips, I learned how to interpret the landscapes I was hiking through: the summer before my first year at university, my mum and I went hiking through a spot she's been going to for decades, on the Austrian-Italian border, and I loved the landscape but I didn't understand it. We went back two years later, and this time I brought a photocopy of a geological map from the 1940s, and it was astonishing to realise how much more I saw. Like, a pale streak on the sheer rockface above a glacier several miles away and significantly above us? Obviously a streak of carbonate rock/limestone that'd been metamorphosed, and was the source of the paler-pink garnets we were finding in the glacier till, as opposed to the darker-red ones from the surrounding metamorphosed mudstone.
And just... getting to see the world that way, getting to look out a train window and know what's going on, is kind of intoxicating. The sense of understanding the rock beneath my feet is incredible.
Which doesn't have much to do with my current dayjob, though: I'm not a field geologist, because health. Where I am is the intersection between chemistry and geology: I use my chemistry background on a daily basis, to help me generate and interpret data from a small handful of volcanoes from around the world. And the thing that I think is proper incredible about this, right, is that from looking at tiny quantities of ground-up lava from these volcanoes, I am contributing to our understanding of how the Earth works on the scale of plate tectonics, because I can go from 100mg of rock powder to going "okay, so the material that melted to produce this had a composition of X, which means it must have contained at least some Y", and... it's amazing. It's this tiny niche field and I get to work out how our planet works and it is absolutely incredible.
Why volcanoes? Mmm, I don't know, they just sort of grabbed at me. Very thin slices of volcanic rock under a microscope are beautiful; I'm interested in the processes by which they form, in a way that just hasn't ever happened for sedimentary rocks. And why the data and machines in this subfield? Because my chemistry background is enough of a part of my identity that I get kind of sad if I'm not getting to spend regular time in Proper Labs with pipettes and concentrated acids and lab coats and gloves and such. I'm not sure why that's turned out to matter so much to me, but apparently it has: there's something incredibly soothing about getting to sit still and quiet and move with care and precision.
So: a mixture of activities I enjoy doing, and topics that grab at my heart and compel me to wonder. This is a good deal of why I say that my day job is the thing I do for fun, to give me the energy to keep going with my activism.
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I like that - that you went with a field that required EFFORT. That you knew would take WORK to learn. That's awesome! And proves that you really are a scientist. Scientists are learners, they want to learn.
So going into a field where you HAVE to learn instead of just coasting on "this is cool and I can do this easily" says lots and lots of good things about you.
The graphene....I think I've heard that before. Don't they use that in things like electrical switches? Stuff to conduct electricity?
Also YOU WENT TO CAMBRIDGE?! That's, like, even better than Harvard!
It's easy to see, now that you describe it, how those trips out to the fields and areas where you live played into the things you are doing now. And beautiful, that you can take something you loved then into something you love NOW. That's such a direct way of going about it - I envy that. And it's strong that you kept on the right path to DO all that.
Also volcano's are AWESOME. They are like the Earth's organs. Okay, not that, but they are the closest link between what goes on underneath us to what we can see above us. Like, whatever gets spewed out was buried way deep below and is OLD. So many clues about how things used to be.
It's important that we study that.
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Graphene: it's incredibly strong, very light, and a brilliant electrical conductor, yeah. It hasn't got any commercial applications yet, but it's really cool stuff from a research perspective!
And -- yep, Cambridge grad. I have Many Feelings about the way science undergraduates are taught there, mostly negative, but I'm really conflicted about how to even talk about them, because it is undeniably the case that the network of professional connections I have as a result has been incredibly helpful in terms of getting positions (my paid summer research positions in Zurich and LA; some of the conferences I've been to; getting the PhD stipend that pays my rent) and simply in terms of being sociable. So I am torn between wanting to tell potential applicants that they'll probably get a better education elsewhere, and recognising that Cambridge as an undergrad institute isn't really about the teaching, in most useful senses, and it's honestly a bit grim. I have no idea if I'd choose the same way if I were applying to universities now.
YESSSS about them being the best window we've got to the Earth's mantle etc etc -- this is some of what excites me so much. :D