VM: Hello everyone, my name is Viridis Miranda. I’m a SciComm intern at EarthScope Consortium. Here I have Asif Ashraf. He’s a graduate student and in the Cloud On-Ramp program of EarthScope Consortium and I’ll be interviewing him today. Hi Asif, how are you today? 

AA: Good. How are you doing? 

VM: Good myself. So Asif, I heard that you’re a graduate student. Could you talk about how did you get to know about your graduate program? What you do, as for your research, and what cool experiences have you done so far as a graduate student? 

AA: So I’m a graduate student of geophysics at the University of Oregon and before that I started my masters in geophysics at University of Nebraska-Lincoln. So I kind of knew the world of geophysics research and different graduate schools and mostly I worked on Cascadia Subduction Zone in my masters. So I was looking for different projects on Cascadia Subduction Zone and I found one. Then I emailed professors at the University of Oregon and from that point I am continuing this sort of research journey. In terms of like cool things, being a graduate student in geophysics, especially a graduate student in Earth Science, allows me to travel to a lot of cool places, that I would say, is the most cool thing you know studying geophysics particularly earth science. I went to the Galapagos Islands and like also different exotic places. Which probably I would never be able to do that if I was not an earth science graduate student. Yeah. So that’s the most cool thing from my graduate experience. 

VM: Oh, that’s awesome. And which places do you like the best of all of them that you traveled so far?

AA: I’m going to say I like Oregon best because I’m living here, but I may be biased, but I like the nature of Oregon so much that I really like living here and I like traveling to different places of Oregon and like you can just drive half an hour distance from my home city and you can go to different waterfalls, you can hike different mountains. And I really like to be in the nature. So, I’m going to say Oregon is the, you know, best place. 

VM: Yeah, I full on agree. I love Oregon myself. Never been there, but I would like to sightsee and see the geology overall. Do you consider yourself more a field geophysicist or more into hard coding geophysicist? Because in geophysics, there is a realm of being into field work, and being into computing and hard coding, and then you have the geophysicists that do a little bit of both. What do you consider yourself as? 

AA: So as a graduate student, most of my time I do hard coding. Most of my time I do data analysis. Then I do high performance computing with all the different data. But the reason I’m able to do that because I collected–we as a team collected a lot of data in the Cascadia 

Subduction Zone when I started my geophysics research career and so we collected the data for like one month. We deployed over 700/800 mobile

seismometers. I went to different fields. I went to–drove to different mountains, different beaches to install the seismometers. Then I have sort of all the data from that experiment. Now I use that data to build up different tomographic models which you know the most of the work that I’m doing now. So once that field part is finished then from that point it’s not so much about the fieldwork, but just you know crunching the data, making different models, doing different analyses, so mostly the analysis side  I would say. 

VM: Would you say that the post-processing data or how you retrieve all your data–which process is more is more challenging? 

AA: So because we use the seismometers from PASSCAL which is an EarthScope data center. Now we got the data from them in a hard drive. Then we had to convert into different data types so I can keep those data. So it’s–I want to say processing and analysis of the data is, I think, is harder than just installing some seismometers over in different ranges and it’s not, you know, so much more fun  because you’re just in front of your computer doing all this, but it’s fun in its own way, but not so fun if you compare it to the field activity where you can go different places and use seismometers. 

VM: Oh that’s awesome. I currently work as a geophysical analyst at the Puerto Rico Seismic Network. I have not experienced installing a seismometer, but I have with doing geophysical surveys, with geophones and with seismic nodes, which are really fun, and do the post-processing data and seeing those waveforms. I really do enjoy it. Which programs do you use in order to process all this data? 

AA: I mostly code it myself. So I do tomographic modeling. So first of all I um take all this FCNT data convert it to MSEED. Then from the MSEED I mostly convert to SEG. It depends on the shot and receiver geometry that I’m using. So right now I’m developing a high density or high resolution tomographic model of Cascadia Subduction Zone. And for that I need to have a lot of different combinations of stations and the shots. So I can cover the whole region. So I convert the data with mostly coding with MatLab and Python combined. Then I do the tomographic modeling which is also coding. But that’s code set up by a professor here. So I have access to the code. I just use that code to make the model. 

VM: I’m trying to learn Python myself but on Google CoLab, not in a terminal, and I’m also learning how to do a virtual machine and it’s been quite an experience. I come from a geochemistry background and for my master’s research I switched more into geophysics. So I’m still learning how to code many things but it’s pretty cool that you do seismic tomography. And also, another question of mine is how did you find out about the Cloud On-Ramp opportunity at EarthScope Consortium, and what did you find so interesting about it when you applied? 

AA: So first of all, I kind of knew about the Cloud On-Ramp internship before, I know that they offer Student Career internships each year. I knew that before, but each year, my professors said that you don’t need to do an internship, because you’re going to do RA, you’re going to be employed as a research assistant because you need to do research, but I am in my fourth year and I’m going to graduate very soon. So I think I was thinking going into an internship would be valuable from the perspective of career things, networking things, because we’re taught of most of this basic stuff in graduate school, so I thought applying here would teach me some of the valuable skills that I need to transition from an academic side to more of like an applied side, in terms of career choice. Yeah, I sort of knew about these positions and I chose the Cloud On-Ramp internship because I was mostly intrigued on cloud computing, how that works, because I know in future most of the research directions are data analytics, most of these things are going into cloud optimized data sets. So most of the servers are transitioning from their local big server into a cloud-based server. So I kind of wanted to sit in the front row to watch how it happened. And I was very fortunate to be accepted into this position, so I can learn more about this cloud computing thing. 

VM: And what do you most like about it, out of like coding and out of working on a cloud-based program? 

AA: So what I’m doing now I’m building different notebooks which are going to be used in workshops, whether that will be an asynchronous workshop or in-person workshop. So what I like most about it is thinking of how cloud computing is different than the local machine computing or the HPC computing that we’re all used to. And I’m sort of motivating–I’m making the notebook from the perspective of motivating different people why they should switch their entire geophysics research workflow from the local thing to the cloud thing, like this is worth doing. So most of my notebooks are designed in a way to motivate different people to move their stuff to the cloud because it is much more manageable and it is much faster, which I have discovered. So, you know, thinking from that perspective you know, building up different workflows and showing people why cloud computing is the future and why you should think about it now rather than later about this cloud computing stuff. 

VM: I full on agree, my advisor tells me that cloud computing is amazing. You can create notebooks and then you could also clone your notebooks and run it locally on your machine. That’s also another thing that you can do which is pretty cool. Yeah. My next question is, since you’re working towards your career, you’re also doing graduate studies, and this full-time internship is giving you the experience that you are looking for. What advice would you give for students going into college or going into graduate studies and studying geophysics or any STEM related field? 

AA: So one thing I would tell them–be passionate. Sometimes the data crunching part or data processing part can be really tiresome and because I do a lot of the things with coding–and with coding you need to be very persistent–you need to keep debugging until it is done. So in order to have that patience I would say you need to be passionate. So one way you can be passionate about the research that you’re doing is to understand it completely. So not just do the stuff but why I’m doing it and why it matters and how that works. Just understanding from that perspective gives you a lot of passion and that will, I think, drive you into a better work environment. 

I agree. As someone that’s learning how to code, sometimes when you get like the red lines, you’re missing a comma or the syntax is wrong. Or for example, myself that I try to put slash commands in a cloud notebook, which is not going to work because you’re not working in a terminal. I think you have to be very patient, but also be passionate and not give up. Not give up at all. Aside from doing all of these cool things, what else do you do as your hobby or in your free time?

AA:  In my free time–so I’m married–so in my free time, I try to go hiking with my wife. We go to different beaches, like Oregon has the most amazing beaches. Again, I’m probably biased, but we go to different beaches, different mountains, and different waterfalls whenever we get the time. And I would say that’s the most that we do in our lazy time. 

VM: I’m the same. I’m from Puerto Rico and here we have a whole bunch of beaches, a whole bunch of mountain ranges. We have karst in the north and karsts in the south and then we have bathyliths and I do that in my downtime too. So that’s pretty cool.

Thanks for your responses, Asif!