This summer we’re introducing interns from Student Career, RESESS, and Geo-Launchpad programs to highlight their research projects and how EarthScope programs further their career goals.
Dulaney Boonsue and Izzy Twomey are two RESESS interns working with the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks this summer. Dulaney is an undergraduate student pursuing a bachelors in geology with a concentration in solid earth at the Western Carolina University. Izzy is working towards bachelors in geoscience and astrophysics at Wellesley College. Dulaney is a seasoned outdoors enthusiast, having held jobs as an outdoor guide and rafting guide. Izzy also enjoys the outdoors and works as an astrophotographer for her college’s on-campus observatory. During their RESESS internships, Dulaney and Izzy are working on the same volcanic system on Unimak Island. Both are interested in ultimately working towards graduate degrees in a geophysics-related field, and are using their time in the RESESS program to narrow down interests. Read their interview below!
Hayley Bricker: How did you guys get into geoscience, and what made you interested in geoscience or astronomy and the outdoors in the first place?
Dulaney Boonsue: I got into geoscience and the world of geology, because as a kid, I’d come home with rocks in my pockets, and mom would get mad when they went through the dryer. I had a deep affiliation with the outside growing up. My dad specifically, always got me out into the outdoors, from hiking to kayaking and everything in between. And just having that ability to be outside fostered that, it’d be cool to do that as a job someday. When I got to college, I came in undecided, and when I was rolling through the majors list, I ended up seeing geology, and I was like, “you know, maybe this will be cool.” I was in the med field before and wanted to maybe forgo that amount of schooling, but we’ll see how many years I end up being in school for anyways. But that outdoors passion and then just coming to college and having the freedom to choose was kind of how I got here.
Izzy Twomey: When I was in high school, I loved physics, but my high school had a singular physics class, so I took that and decided I wanted to do astrophysics. Somewhere between there and getting to college, I decided I was going to switch to psychology. So my first year at Wellesley, I decided I was going to be a psych major, and took a bunch of psych classes. And then sophomore year, it got to the fall semester, and I was like, you know, I’m not really loving this. What if I just took some different classes? I kind of miss natural sciences. So I took both classes in geology and astronomy and absolutely loved it and decided that I enjoyed it way more than what I’ve been studying before., I love to spend time outdoors, even looking back to my photos from before my sophomore year, they’re rocks and stars and mountains and stuff and so then, to me, it was a really cool opportunity to combine the stuff I was really interested in with my academics, and I haven’t looked back since.
HB: Have you had any opportunity to do research in your academic careers thus far? Is this the first opportunity?
DB: In the honors college at my university, for credit, you can do additional projects outside of class, and I ended up doing that for many of my lower level geology courses. Previously I had done very minor research. I suppose the majority of it was going out in the field, collecting some data, looking at it, and being like, “yep, that’s where it came from,” and just confirming things. But this is my first very real research experience where there are no answers already. It’s been a really great experience so far.
IT: For me, I haven’t really had the chance to do pretty much any research as of yet in undergrad, beyond little things for classes like collecting data or analyzing it, but nothing large scale, or that’s actually part of a larger project. So this is my first time doing that and it’s been really cool so far, very different than working in a classroom. It feels somewhat intimidating, but also really cool that we’re working on stuff that hasn’t been done before and that there isn’t a solution we know already.
HB: Can you tell me a little bit about how you found this internship program, how you got to the project that you’re working on now, and what you guys are doing?
DB: Our projects are actually starting at two ends of a spectrum and coming together in the middle to meet. My half is specifically creating models for the volcanic system as a whole and looking at the plumbing system so that we might be able to see interactions across the entire Unimak Island, which is where this volcano is located. I am doing a bunch of research with other people’s papers to find parameters and creating my own model for how this is eventually going to look. And then Izzy’s project is going to come the other way of that, and we’ll hopefully be able to align both of our results and kind of mesh them together to be able to have this finalized, pretty result.
I found this program just while it was in January, and I was looking for summer jobs. I wanted something more in my field. Last summer, I worked three different jobs, as a raft guide and all sorts of different outdoors things. This summer, I wanted to get more career focused, and I found that NSF website for the REUs, and RESESS was under there and I just ended up applying to a lot of different things and got accepted to this one. They presented us with projects, and we got to voice the ones we were most passionate about. And that’s how I got lined up with Alaska, and now I’m here.
IT: I think I was also, in January, looking around for summer research, because I knew I hadn’t done any research and wanted to get a feel for it before I got too far into thinking about grad school and what comes next after undergrad. Our geology department has an outreach group that provides resources for a lot of the students in it, and they had a list of summer research experiences. I just happened upon this one, looked it up, and was like, “oh, that sounds really cool.” Because as someone who studied geology and physics with the focus on geophysics there was really appealing to me, so I applied. And then, same as Dulaney, when I heard I got in, accepted said I would love to come to Alaska and got lucky enough that I actually get to be here.
Then for my work itself, we’re kind of, as Dulaney said, coming in on two opposite ends. She’s starting with what it looks like underground in a volcano and trying to model that to see what it would look like on the surface if these processes happened. And then I’m doing the opposite. I’m taking data from InSAR, so data from satellites, to map the observed deformation and then work to find the inverse, to find the parameters that would cause that. I’m taking the data and going to model, and Dulaney is going from a model to the data.
HB: That’s really cool. I like that you can take the same volcanic system and approach from different perspectives and hopefully everything matches up. Do you guys collaborate with each other pretty frequently on a day-to-day basis?
IT: I think as we collaborated more when we first got here, when we were doing more background research and just trying to understand the generics of the volcanic system and how these processes work, I’d say now a lot of what we do is pretty separate, but hopefully in the end, we’ll reconnect some way.
HB: What does a day-in-the-life of your research project look like?
DB: We normally come in a bit earlier than the typical nine to five so that we can get out in the afternoon. But mainly it consists of coming in and getting behind the computer. I play with the model and research parameters in people’s papers, and I’m doing in depth Google Scholar searches to find different resources and people’s thoughts all the way back from 20 or 30 years ago. And pulling these together, I make notes of what I’m finding and in comparison and see what’s matching up between different people’s thoughts and what’s not. In my models I input and see how they behave and see if anything we’re getting towards looks like it could be viable. Yeah, it’s very much a cubicle life, and that’s okay for what we’re doing.
IT: I think my workday is very variable. It really depends on the current data I’m processing in the software I’m using. So I’ll come in with Dulaney in the morning, and then I’m usually working on a specific set of InSAR data and then using that to create interferograms, which are essentially like images of the changes in the ground position over time. But that requires reprocessing, like setting up the data structures, and then running the processing itself and then modifying the images at the end. So on a given day, I could be doing any one or multiple of those, depending on where I’m at in that process. I’d say a good portion of that day is spent asking myself why my code doesn’t work, or why something’s not running right, and then what’s left over, probably catching up on papers or reading about satellite backgrounds and how the data is archived or communicated.
HB: Are you working with a broader team of folks and who are your mentors? And if you have a question, who do you usually go to to get some guidance?
IT: We’re working in the Geophysical Institute at University of Alaska, Fairbanks, which is essentially a collection of different departments that look at geophysics. We’re in the geodesy group, and they work with the Alaska Volcano Observatory to monitor volcanic systems in Alaska. So we’re part of that broader network, and then within our group, we’re working with a postdoc. Her name is Revathy Parameswaran and she’s our main mentor there on the day to day, helping us figure out what we’re doing because this is a project that, after we leave, that she’s continuing research on. And then the head of the group is Ronni Grapenthin, who is kind of the supervisor of the whole research group for geodesy, so he’s also around to give us advice and support.
HB: What has been your favorite part of this REU experience so far?
DB: For me, I’d say it’s the travel. Getting to live in a new place is challenging but it also has given me an experience that I can try new things in a different place, and I’ve created my own story here, and just the opportunity to have an internship like this, where I get to simply learn stuff that is way beyond what I’m doing in my undergraduate degree. And it is fun to not be the smartest person in the room, I have enjoyed that, and just getting to ask so many questions, and the ability to simply just learn here.
IT: I think for me, also being able to live here in Alaska, like moving across the country, and it’s been a really cool experience to live in a completely new place, in a completely new environment, especially in the area that we’re studying, I think is super neat. But then also, I think within our group at the Geophysical Institute, there’s our mentors and then also grad students and other students and professors in the neighboring departments or groups, and so being able to talk to them and hear about their research too, and kind of their paths has been super great for me to kind of hear what people are doing or how they’ve gotten there. And I find it really inspiring.
HB: I am actually super curious about what it’s like to live in Alaska. I’ve never been there. I would love to go. What’s it like?
IT: I think we both found it a bit isolating being this far from home, but also just because we’re in the middle of the state of Alaska, in, you know, a bigger city for Alaska, but it’s still relatively small, kind of in the middle of a bunch of wilderness, which is beautiful. Definitely, I think both of us, correct me if I’m wrong, are feeling that a little bit being away from home. Definitely the time change. We both live on the east coast, and so there’s a good four hour difference, which definitely makes communication and catching up with friends and family a little more difficult, but we both love to be outside, hiking, backpacking, all of that. And so being here has been such a great opportunity for that. There’s so much, there’s so many amazing places to go and see, hikes, backpacking. It’s been a super amazing opportunity to do that somewhere completely new that I probably would otherwise not be able to get to.
DB: My biggest piece of advice is, if you choose to live here, have a car.
IT: Yes, we’ve been struggling with that one. Fairbanks is not a walkable city. Alaska is not a walkable state.
DB: Yeah, everything is either very far apart, and thank goodness for a bus system. That has been lovely. I live well on the East Coast in the middle of the mountain, so my city is far too small to have a bus system. And this has been a treat to have public transportation in lieu of a car. It’s been a great time. Also make sure you have enough food, because food is very expensive, so money saved up for that. I think that and gas money are where all my paychecks go. But yeah, the wilderness here has been phenomenal. We’ve seen some beautiful places and gotten to do some really cool things out on the weekends and when we have time. And you know, the campus has campus trails, which is amazing. So, like, after work, you can go for a trail run or whatever. And it’s a beautiful place.
HB: Are there any camping trips or backpacking trips you guys have gotten to do so far?
IT: Last week, we decided to get out of the smoke for a bit during the rain, so we took a road trip and did some car camping down south towards Anchorage and the coast, which I thought was super amazing. It was so beautiful. And I didn’t realize how different the environment is down there. It’s a completely different setting but a lot of really cool hikes and camping places. I think the first night we fell asleep looking over like a massive valley in the Alaskan wilderness and watching the sunset from our sleeping bags, which was absolutely amazing.
DB: The sun did not go down.
IT: It was like sunset, and sunset turns into sunrise, and it never gets dark in between yet.
DB: We have hit Solstice, so the days are getting shorter now. By August, we should have the moon back, which will be revolutionary. I have missed that. It’s gonna be really weird the first time night comes back. On Solstice, I actually went and did a raft packing trip as well, which was interesting. The rivers on the East Coast, in the southeast specifically, have too many things going on to be able to transfer more than, like, I don’t know, a 12 mile River Day. And so that was, it was a treat. But yeah, the sun never went down there either. We were paddling till four in the morning because the sun was up and so, yeah, the sun has been always there.
HB: That’s awesome. Yeah, you’re convincing me to go to Alaska next summer.
DB: You should, you got to.
IT: Definitely be a shock when we go back to the lower 48 and there’s like real night, although I like to think I’ll sleep really well once it’s finally, like dark outside.
DB: The biggest benefit of Alaska is I’m going to be able to sleep anywhere at any time.
HB: Do you guys think you’ll come back to Alaska, either maybe for grad school or a job in the future, for another internship?
DB: I have thought a lot about living in Alaska. One of my bucket list items is to do a winter here. I feel like it’d be a great opportunity to learn a lot about myself, and it’d be really challenging. And that’s just something I’ve wanted to do for quite some time, after visiting Alaska last year, and so this is my biggest chance to be back. I suppose I will be applying to graduate schools here, especially with that interest in glaciology as of right now. And they have great programs here for them in Alaska, and then, you know, maybe a job someday. But I kind of want to do a winter here, just to see if that would be a thing that I’d be able to stay for. But we’ll see.
IT: Yeah, I think I would definitely consider coming back. I love being here with all the super accessible nature, and being able to spend so much time outside. I also think it’s hard to say having not been here during the winter, any of the, you know, darker, colder seasons. But I think that’d be also something that I think would be a cool experience. But in terms of academics and grad school, I’m really interested in volcanology and volcano hazard monitoring and so being here near the Alaska Volcano Observatory has been super cool, and especially with all the faculty and researchers here at UAF, there’s a lot of knowledge going around about the things I’m interested in, so I would definitely put that on the list of places I might want to come back to.
Both Izzy and Dulaney will be presenting their work later this year at AGU. Check out their posters to see the culmination of their research projects!