Shawn Lee

August 16th, 2015

It's been a fantastic summer here at Austin, but alas, my wonderful time here in the live music capital of the world has come to an end. I have learned so much here, not just academically but socially as well. Living on my own after having to commute every day to go to school was a huge adjustment, but I'm glad I was able to do it. My summer here felt more like real college than my actual freshmen year did. It has been an honor to work with my advisor, Dr. Jake Walter, and to work alongside the other undergrad, Peter Dotray, on Texas earthquakes. I am sad to go, but I know I will be back in the future either to visit or for grad school. It's been an academic challenging, physically demanding, transformative, and most of all, fun few months. I can't thank IRIS enough for giving me this opportunity, applying was one of the best decisions I have made so far in college. I can't wait to see everyone in December, until then, keep it real Austin.

July 7th, 2015

Happy late July 4th! This would have been more appropriate a couple days ago but better late than never I guess. I don't have any real scientific update to give, so I'll share an experience that I had over July 4th. I was supposed to go to a July 4th fair and fireworks celebration near the river and lake south of downtown with another person but that person ended up bailing at the last moment. I decided to go anyways, cause July 4th is all about independence am I right? The fair was awesome, the food was overpriced, and the sun was high and mighty. Come sundown and the fireworks start shooting off and I can firmly say it was the closest I have ever been to an actual fireworks display. My arm hurt from holding my phone sideways up to the sky for so long. It was a fantastic display that lit of the night sky. You could see the fireworks reflect off the highrises nearby. giving the skyline a weird discoball effect.

When the stampede happened to leave the fair I made a beeline to the nearest bus stop that leaves north, except......all the buses were on detour. Apparently I wasn't the only one caught off guard, a crowd of around 200 just ran in different directions to all the bus stations to get a bead of what was going on. Here I was, phone dead, 11 pm at night, and I had no idea where to go or what to do. Then I saw a little boy (maybe around 7 years old) with his mom, sitting near a bus stop. I went up to them to ask if this bus went north but they had no idea. Well, I decided to sit down anyways to collect my thoughts. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the kid flipping through a kid's book on earthquakes. He kept pointing at the pictures and mentioning all the facts written in there. My inner geologist just compelled me to introduce myself. He was really friendly and he talked about how he just loves tsunamis, earthquakes, and other natural phenomenons. He then pulled out his rock collection to show me. It wasn't geodes, or fancy minerals, but just random rocks he has found over the years. He didn't know what he wanted to do when he grew up, but I told him that was ok; just explore your interests and if that happens to be earth science, hey, we could always use more. I wish I could have talked to him longer, but his mom needed to leave. This boy was definitely inspiring to me in that he was really passionate about the earth, something I don't find in many kids his age. 

I wonder if I had the same drive and passion he did at his age, what kind of future would I have now. To cut a long story short, I ended up flagging a police officer down who was doing security at the July 4 venue to ask how I get home. He told me the wrong bus. I ended up going south and having to double back on a different route on a metro that was so full I had to carry my backpack on my head. I got home around 1 in the morning and the fireworks ended at 10. 

And that was my July 4th. 

June 29th, 2015

So down below is that wonderful map of New Mexico. Yeah, I know it's missing the top waveform, I'll fix that later. In my last blog post I sort of touched on this already, but probably the most frustrating thing for me, and I believe this hits home for many of the other interns, is getting stuck on a piece of code or a part of analysis with no one around to help. Well, maybe "no one" but I don't feel comfortable going around the office asking other researchers to take the time out of their day to help me on something so trivial when my mentor is not present. Even when my mentor is around, I do not want to give off that appearance of a needy child that can't do anything on its own. So, over the past few days I have been trudging along slowly getting things done when in the back of my mind I sort of wished I had a grad student working on a similar project that I could ask questions when my professor isn't available.

Probably my most 'yay!' moment so far doesn't even really have to do with my main research at all. I plotted a map of seismicity in North Texas in GMT on a grey background of Texas. Since it was zoomed in so close, the picture really looked like a bunch of circles on a flat grey pancake. Scientifically, the image did what it was supposed to do, show the reader the lat long of epicenters in Texas but it just looked terrible. No one told me to do it, and it might have been a not so productive use of my time, but after an hour of google magic, I managed to pull in some super high resolution DEM imagery of my study area and use that as a basemap (this was done all before the hw for the image below was posted unfortunately). The picture looks really cool and after I put in some more stations on it I'll be happy to show it. I just felt really proud making something that looked so interesting (to myself at least), it didn't even matter that it really did not advance my research goal all that much and it took far longer that I had anticipated. 

June 21st, 2015

The past week I have been working on looking at the magnitude 4 earthquake that happened earlier this year as well as other smaller quakes in recent times near Dallas. I gathered the waveform data from the IRIS website and had to remove the instrument response and transform the digital counts that the seismometer records into actual physical units such as velocity and amplitude. This proved more difficult than expected because each station that recorded the earthquake had different channels in which the information was recorded, not all of them recorded the same directional components, and not all of them were named in the same format. Since I was gathering around 20 stations worth of information for each quake, and each station had around 200 different information files that came along with it, writing code to loop through them all and account for all the differences in recorded data proved challenging. I managed to get most of the data processed, and hopefully I will be able post some of my results soon. My mentor isn't always present to help me, so I've had to learn how to scour the internet and just problem solve on my own. Yeah, spending three hours trying to solve what I believed to be a complex problem but all I needed to do was delete a comma can be incredibly annoying, but that is what research is all about I guess.

Living on my own has proven to be a large adjustment for me as well. Since I commute everyday from home to go to school in the regular school year, this would be the first time I have lived hundreds of miles away from my family for such a long length of time. Grocery shopping takes such a long time...and trying to cook healthy meals just means more time spent. It's so easy to just buy a $4.99 frozen burrito and throw it in the microwave but that's not the type of life I want to live. It doesn't make it any easier when none of my roommates cook and I'm the only one really using a kitchen knife and an appliance that isn't the microsave or panini maker...

June 13th, 2015

It's the end of week 2 and I've spent most of the week working on the Antelope software package picking waveforms. I'm working on a database of around 11 seismometers in north Texas that dates from October 2014 to January 2015. The specific software being used was developed at U Boulder. No one yet has looked at the events in this database yet so all the events I am picking are completely new. That also means if anything goes wrong my name is on it :O. Once all these events are picked I'll be aggregating them into a map of Texas so getting the locations right is imperative. I will also be working on creating Matlab scripts for further post-processing. 

Ok, now that all the technicals are out of the way, I recently visited the Texas State History Museum. I got to say, Texans are fiercly attached to their independence considering 80% of the museum was dedicated to the Alamo and the war for Texas Independence...Also apparently one of the most famous slogans of the Texas war for indepedence, "Come and Take it," was fought over a cannon the size of two subway sandwiches. Huh. 

June 5th, 2015

Hi everyone! It is my fourth day in Austin Texas and I am still settling in both mentally and physically. For a Bay Area boy, the Austin region feels like a 24/7 sauna. The city itself is awesome though. My professor gave me a driving tour of downtown Austin and I even got the chance to visit the famous Austin bridge bats where thousands of bats fly out from underneath an overhang on a bridge at night (the picture is of tour boats looking at the bats). For the first couple of days I have been here I have been introduced to specialized first arrival waveform picking software in UNIX and have had some practice with gmt in a linux environment. On monday, I will be traveling to Dallas with another student to install seismometers to incorporate into an ongoing seismic database around the north Texas area. These seismometers are tiny! They are much smaller than the ones we put out in New Mexico. It will be interesting to see how different the installation will be. My goals for the summer will be to improve my knowledge of the unix environment and understand how to post process seismic data catalogs in a variety of ways and how each method is applicable to different project goals. 

The project is flexible and I may be able to utilize some of the methods I have learned in my home institution to get at questions that may be important such as seismic hazards in the Texas area.  This is a special opportunity for me to start thinking about how life as a grad student will be and how to think like a researcher. 

Bat watching boats underneath S Congress Bridge

May 28th, 2015

The food here is amazing. I have never gained so much weight in so little time. Luckily, the oppressive New Mexico temperatures are sweating out my weight in water. Our accomodations are high quality dorms meant to mimic that homely Motel 6 feel. Despite being in a desert, the plant life here is so much more vibrant than the dust bowl that California has recently become with the drought. I wish I could ship some of the water over, from one desert to another.