Hi everyone!
How is it November already? I feel like October lasted for only 0.5 seconds! May be because, I’ve been a lot busier than before, especially in the past two weeks – both in terms of academic and personal lives. As such, I don’t have anything special prepared for today’s post. I’m just going to tell you all about my regular life updates haha!
So, first things first, I successfully submitted the first draft of my thesis proposal. I’m quite happy because I was able to stick to my timetable till the end and managed an early submission, which gave me plenty of time to make some smaller changes to the proposal. Arduous as the whole process was, I learnt a lot of new things, especially during the literature review for the draft. I mostly focused on publications that involved brightness temperature observations through MRM and thermal infrared imaging through Diviner, just to wrap my head around the whole idea. I wouldn’t say I understood everything perfectly, but I’m slowly getting the hang of it. Next step in my book is to familiarize myself with the datasets I’ll be using.
Unfortunately, I haven’t started “working” on my research yet due to some hindrance, but I plan to very soon. After a discussion Catherine and I had, we decided that I should start with mapping out the radar-dark haloed craters in terms of their brighter and darker ejecta distribution first and once that is done, I’ll continue by making various comparisons between different datasets. Apart from that, most of the last weeks I was busy working on the group project report and lab assignments. Anthony and I worked on one of the assignments together as we were both struggling with it a bit and thought, two’s better than one and it paid off.
Another exciting news that I want to share with you is that I’m now a part of the Mini-RF science team, as a team affiliate and that is all thanks to Catherine! I feel like I’m out of my depth here, and not really sure what to expect, but all I know is that I’m really excited to have gotten this chance! Yay!
Now moving onto some life updates, my best friend is getting married in just a little over a month!!! Honestly, I’m a bit conflicted about my feelings. On the one hand, I feel quite lucky that I’m here in India for the wedding, because if this year had progressed as usual, I’d be in Canada. On the other hand however, the wedding is going to be completely different than how my friend imagined it to be all thanks to COVID. Anyways, I also celebrated my birthday last week by treating myself to a complete day without work, and it was amazing! It was a bit lonely not having friends over like always but it was also kind of special in a way. When this year started, I didn’t think that I’d get to celebrate it with my family. So even though, there wasn’t a big celebration it was nice, getting to spend some extra time with my family haha.
The next few days, I’ll most probably be busy with the preparation of Diwali! It’s a new-year for Gujarati people and the celebration is going to be a bit different this year. However, one thing hasn’t changed- the year end cleaning! My brother and I are going to be helping my mum with the cleaning and rearranging stuff in my home.
On a completely unrelated note, I’ve started learning the American Sign Language. It’s a slow progress but fun nonetheless. So far I’ve learned signs for the alphabets, common greetings, introductory statements, and common one word phrases like please, thank you and sorry. I found this YouTube channel which has a great collection of ASL lessons for beginners. I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in learning ASL.
To the Moon and Beyond 