Owyn Colwell
Owyn Colwell is a student at Beloit College currently completing his research at University of Rochester under Dr. Tolulope Olugboji.
Writing an Elevator Pitch
July 15th, 2021
The past week I have been working on the elevator speech assignment. While I’ve prepared elevator pitches for selling my art, I haven’t really done so for more complex topics. This speech was more difficult than I thought it would be. I mostly struggled with boiling things down and not going into a lot of detail and keeping it short. I wanted to make it understandable for people with a wide range of knowledge of seismology. When I thought it was done I practiced it with some friends and asked for feedback. I wound up changing a few things that I didn’t realize were jargon. I didn’t enjoy writing this a whole lot but it helped me practice a skill that I will need for my career as a scientist.
Data and Research Skills:
July 1st, 2021
My project changed so now I’m reading a paper about estimating sensor misorientations. The method I’m focusing on uses differences in rayleigh wave arrival angle times to detect station orientation with a python program called DLOPy. I know very little python at this point so I’m not sure how this will go but I’m still excited. I’m currently figuring out how to reproduce some of the figures from the paper to make sure I know what I’m doing before I try using data from other stations. Right now it calculates some station orientations but not others and its driving me up the wall.
Skills:
Over the past week and a half I’ve gotten much better at going through scientific papers and pulling out useful information. I started using Mendeley to annotate and make notes on PDFs of the papers I'm reading which has made going back and looking for things easier. I’m becoming more comfortable using the linux terminal.
Data:
The data I’m using is rayleigh waves between 10Hz and 40Hz from a list of about 1000 stations scattered around Africa. Right now I’m accessing it with the IRIS DMC but later I’ll be accessing data stored on the labs computer. Most stations have a few years of data but the station I’ve been using for tests has data all the way back to 1993 which is kind of cool.
Introduction and Summer Goals
July 1st, 2021
Hi y’all, I’m Owyn and I am a senior physics major at Beloit College. I will be producing a data catalog for seismic stations around Africa at the University of Rochester. My internship is virtual but I’m still really excited to be doing something fun and challenging. My first day I did a lot of reading and learning how to use the super computer.
Week 1-3
I want to get to know the other lab members, learn more about seismology and improve my programming skills. My school doesn’t offer a seismology course so I will be learning a lot from scientific papers and journals. I’m really glad I’m in the seismology skill workshop because I’m already using a lot of the linux commands.
Week 4-6
At this point I hope to be more independent and feel more comfortable using linux, matlab and python. I want to have a good understanding of what my project is and be more efficient at reading scientific papers.
Week 7-9
By the end of my internship I want to be able to explain my project to both geologists and non-geologists. I also want to have a good idea of what doing research is like and if I want to go into seismology for graduate school.
Through out the summer I want to improve my problem solving skills and learn how to write better. Another goal of mine is to draw or paint twenty minutes a day. It isn’t really related to my project but sometimes it helps me focus better throughout the day.