S-STEM Scholar RJ Mabry's Blog

Thank you all for your patience and I apologize for my late response. I promise I have a reason for this. This week I was faced with my biggest blessing and curse in my adult life; the Army. To clarify, I left a full time (and well paying)  military position in order to complete my BS in Chemistry by 2020. This is a personal goal that I will not comprise on,for the sake of my happiness, purpose, and direction in life. Attempting to balance a 40+ hour demanding work week as well as finishing classes that demand participation has been a tough balancing act.  At times it seemed like I was asked to complete a task that required four arms, when I've only been issued two. The National Guard is explained as only on the weekends, but I've more often than not found myself devoted to it in a full time capacity. While both sides of the aisle, the Army and College, would like me to get a degree and professionally progress it often has to be on their terms which rarely coincide. Even...

Hello again! This week I got started learning ArcGIS. This is a professional geographical mapping system which is used not only in STEM careers but anything that requires surveying land. This is an awesome program but requires some learning, though I know this will help me greatly as I move forward in my career. Dr. Hamdan was kind enough to get me a textbook and some links so I can complete online training. While I'm ansty to get outside, most of my time so far has been spent at a desk. I try to avoid work on my gaming computer, but sometimes you have to make sacrifices While its intuitive that you will need to do lots of reading and background learning, I somehow tricked myself into thinking it wouldn't be this in depth. If there is anything I can take away from starting a research program, it is definitely that 75% of the time you spend will be researching and designing your methods.  For brevity's sake, I met with Dr. Hamdan again to receive feedback ...

This week I have been tasked with the rather daunting assignment; designing my research project. Dr. Hamdan was awesome enough to get her hands on some resources so I can become more familiar with ArcGIS but that was the end of my excitement. Dr. Hamdan instructed me to select a site to collect samples from along with defining the methods of collection. These collection sites were already outlined in Dr. Hamdan's previous paper, "Recreational Shooting in Tonto National Forest, AZ: a case study of heavy metal contamination in desert soils" (2016). After reading her paper I was told to evaluate each site while keeping in mind that we have the money for approximately 40 samples. I needed to make a decision considering various factors, defend that decision, then create a sampling method. I initially began to feel overwhelmed, as this is brand new to me and it felt like I was now presented to climbing a mountain. But if there's one thing I learned from hiking mou...

This week was comprised of a tedious but very important aspect of a research project: learning some background knowledge. The day I begged Dr. Hamdan to let me assist her research, she sent me a multitude of publications so I could gain a basic knowledge of what heavy metal contamination consists of. While not the most exciting way to learn, its a practice I need to become familiar with. Reading publications sounds straight forward however, I am not a seasoned scientist with a PhD. Nor am I laid back enough to just read something without fully understanding it. Therefore, whenever I came across terminology, techniques, and concepts I was unaware of I would stop and find online material to read regarding it. By the time I finished researching, I had spent approximately 10 hours in the library and various coffee shops. There's 4 shots of Espresso in that coffee, in case you were wondering. So that we are all on the same page, I will summarize some of the interesting things I...