Whenever I visited my grandmother’s house, one of my favorite things to do was play with Microsoft Word. Not the most conventional of computer games, but I really enjoyed learning everything I could about the different functions and tweaking each WordArt option until I deemed it beautiful.
Entering my undergraduate career, Microsoft WordArt became MATLAB and GMT. I quickly learned the basics and even more quickly learned some advanced techniques like building GUIs and plotting an entire profile of data. By the end of my coursework on MATLAB, I was the go-to person for solving computer programming questions among my peers. This continued well into my graduate coursework. It was not uncommon to hit pause while analyzing my data and creating figures for my Master’s thesis to correct someone’s logic after they produced error after error. After graduation, I decided to expand my toolbox of languages and took online courses in Python and R through DataCamp. From these courses, I started tweaking some scripts, analyzing images, and building stand-alone .exe files with GUIs to use in my personal life.
My position at the University of Minnesota Duluth’s Large Lakes Observatory allowed me to combine my love of details and computer programming with another passion I discovered during my graduate career: conducting research aboard a vessel. One of the best feelings comes from personally collecting the data, converting it into a usable form, and helping someone to visualize what it represents. As a technician, I was able to do so for moored instruments, meteorological buoys, and underwater autonomous gliders. Now, as a technician at the National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research, I work with an even greater variety of instruments, environments, and researchers and continue supporting aquatic science on shore and aboard vessels.
If it sounds like I can help you unlock the secrets of a specific underwater area, let me know!
