It always surprises me how good a break can be for renewing enthusiasm for a project. I didn't feel run down at the end of 2023, nor do I find the Christmas period particularly restful, but even just using my brain for a different purpose for a couple of weeks has left me feeling refreshed and excited about the next stage of my PhD project. I guess there is something in just switching off from something for a week or two!
A fun ski tour is becoming a Hogmanay (New Year's Eve in Scotland) tradition I can get on board with. And this year's route did not disappoint. A real exercise in linking up patches of beautiful wind blown snow and avoiding the wind-scoured icy bits!
The first item on the list for 2024 is attending the Tectonic Studies Group (TSG) annual conference in St Andrews, 9-11th January. I have a poster presentation again and am inviting attendees to take part in the first "experiment" of my project. Without giving too much away, participants will be asked to spend 15-20min marking up a drone image of an outcrop with the fractures that they see. I will run some analyses on the digitised observations to illustrate areas of agreement of different fracture parameters. They will each complete a questionnaire as well which aims to characterise individual academic and work experience etc. to give some context to the results.
While I have enjoyed the literature review and research question formulation part of the project, it is exciting to now be doing something. I am looking forward to the conference and hopefully getting some interesting results to populate my next poster or verbal presentation with.
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