Well that bit about having lots of time to post hasn’t quite proved true this past week, but I’ve finally gotten most of the errands I had to do upon return out of the way and am settling into a somewhat regular schedule.

Today is a briefing, if you will, on what is in store for me this coming semester. Class is a good place to start – this semester I’m enrolled in:

• Fundamentals of Environmental Science
• Sustainable Use & Management of Tropical Forests
• Development & Conservation
• Environmental Economics
• Research Seminar

If you were with me in the early days last semester you’ll remember that a similar listing came with syllabi and initial impressions of those classes. Well this semester all of those classes have been piled into the second quarter – the months of June & July – so in the interim I have no class, just the occasional Wednesday research meeting. In other words, I’ll save the class overviews for June when I actually begin taking the classes.

By now you’re probably thinking the same thing everyone else on campus thinks when they realize I don’t have class today, tomorrow, or for the foreseeable future: what the hell is he doing? Short answer – my thesis. Long answer – I’m in the early stages of GIS post-processing the field data I collected during my stay in Camiguin.

By “post-processing” I mean that I have all of the data I require to complete my thesis, but it’s currently in a raw form, and now it’s time to pare, preen, and polish it into something that’ll make my salty old professors cower beneath their desks. My current daily task this week is digitizing, wherein you take material data (in this case several contour maps of the island), scan them into digital form, and then manually convert their data into something the computer can manipulate. In this particular example I’m digitizing contour lines, so if you can imagine clicking your mouse approximately 17,000 times a day as you trace an elevation line around an island, well, that’s my daily work this week – painstaking, mind numbing, but worthwhile in the end. By digitizing the contours I can generate an excellent digital elevation model (DEM) and as every good GIS-monkey knows, the DEM is the heart of any analysis.

All in all the above means that it will still be some weeks before I begin truly writing my thesis in earnest. The GIS is critical though as it allows me to inject some badly-needed comprehensive quantitative analyses into an otherwise “soft-science” qualitative thesis.

Moving on, I’ve begun shamisen lessons again. I was unable to take my shamisen out of its travel case in the Philippines, much less actually play it because the humidity/fungus situation was so bad. I was constantly having to scrub mold and fungus off every piece of leather I owned, and as the shamisen’s box is made of dog skin… well, it’d have been irreparably ruined. So my first lesson was this past Saturday and I had only managed to practice once since my return, and therefore once in slightly over 2 months. I’m not going to lie, it was rough going, but my sensei understood and we had a good laugh at the expense of my pride as I bumbled and stumbled through one song after another. It really felt good to play again though, just another one of the 100’s of reasons I’m glad I’m back.

You may have noticed the counter on the top left of the main page has been changed and is now counting down towards “my big internship break.” Due to some scheduling wizardry, after I turn in my last final exam for this semester on July 30th, I won’t be due in class again until the following April, 2007. I have taken what is generally a 4 semester program and condensed it into 3 semesters, but am also taking a 1 semester break between 2 and 3. Explaining this isn’t going as well as I thought it would, let’s try a chart…

Fall 2005 – 1st Semester	Class
Spring 2006 – 2nd Semester	Class
Fall 2006 – 3rd Semester	Off
Spring 2007 – 4th Semester	Class

 

Right, that makes it considerably more clear I think. So now you may be thinking “why don’t you just take those final classes this fall and graduate early?” – certainly a fair question. Well in the world of graduate-level internships they all have one common requirement: you must still have graduate classes remaining to be taken upon completion of your internship. So I can either choose to graduate a semester early and then try and find a job with no work experience, or I can use that semester off to log some high-profile internship work thereby giving me a *much* better chance of landing work equivalent to my abilities and skills upon graduation.

What sort of internship am I talking about? Well I’ve got my eye on a plum – an environmental policy internship with the World Bank in either Washington, D.C. or Moscow, Russia during the winter of 2007. The World Bank is one of the few international organizations that offers paid internships(always a huge plus) and have a biannual internship program that is scheduled heavily in my favor. You see, they take summer interns for June-August and winter interns for January-March, but by their own admission and through common knowledge there are *far* fewer graduate students able to apply for that winter program than the summer one. Think about it, when was the last time anyone you knew had January, February, AND March off from classes? So the numbers are in my favor, my qualifications are more than adequate, and I’m fairly optimistic(am I ever pessimistic about anything?) that I can land a spot doing global climate change and/or renewable energy policy for the World Bank next winter. That, my friends, would be Fucking Awesome.

The last news worthy of note is that I received notice yesterday evening that I have been cleared by whichever security organization handles such things to attend a day-long tour of the Saga Nuclear Power plant in Genkai City, Saga Prefecture. This incredible field-trip will take place on April 26th, next Wednesday, and you can bet that I’ll be taking as many pictures as I possibly can – let’s just hope they don’t mind. So late next week check back here for what should be a pretty awesome journal entry on that little adventure.

Being an academic certainly has its perks sometimes doesn’t it?