Stepping Into the Unknown

ello, my name is Sean McLaughlin. I’m a rising junior, and I’ve joined Deanna for the summer of 2021 to work on methane mapping in key Appleton sites using the Aeris MIRA Pico Mobile LDS monitoring system. My experience in my first two-and-a-half weeks of research has been very widely encompassing, and at times a bit overwhelming. This is the topic I’d like to touch on this week, as I think it has made me a better researcher as a result.

My work with Aeris (as I will call it for short) involves a lot of coding work in addition to the more evident engineering work and sampling. This is one field I had yet to foray into during my time in academia thus far. As such, it has been quite the learning curve. I have spent more hours than I can count combing through DataCamp, attempting to make sense of very non-visual products in my visually-learning mind. What I am most happy with to date, however, is not that I have a handle on the basics and can interpret code now, but that I was able to overcome the mental block of being put in a wholly unknown environment and being able to pull together the resilience to make progress.

I should make clear, this is my first endeavor into organized research, which has added to the anxiety of the unknown. I know that this is by no means a novel experience; I am well aware that a good portion of my colleagues on campus are in exactly the same boat. But it pays to be able to figure out exactly where that resilience to push through uncertainty comes from. For me, I’ve found that in the acceptance of failure. I’ve come to realize that within this discipline more than perhaps any other, things go wrong. I had to wait the majority of this week for R to update to even begin to try to work with real code. But when push comes to shove, the way I measure my own success now is not whether everything ends up following my prescribed plan to a “T,” but rather whether or not I learned from the outcome. I may have finally figured out how to think like a scientist after years of solely academic work.

Since this realization, I’ve been able to make maps in R I would have found nearly impossible a week ago, and managed to get Aeris up and running for the first time in around a year (I think?). I know it’s just a start, but progress is progress, and I’m learning all the time. I’m excited to see what’s to come this summer! Here's one of those maps, which I am relatively proud of: