What was your favorite part about your UseIT experience?

Working with SCEC in the UseIT program has been great this summer but my
favorite part was probably the field trips since I enjoy traveling, going
out into the field, or doing anything outside. So it was fun seeing
features of the San Andreas and San Jacinto fault systems and hearing talks
by guest scientists. The first field trip and the San Diego field trip were
both enjoyable trips.

What about the UseIT program have you benefited from most?

I think it was useful for me to try and learn computer programming or at
least get some more exposure to it since I havent really done any
programming before and it can be very educational to learn by working in
pairs or small groups.

If you would do anything differently if you did this program over again, what would you do and why?

The only thing I might have done differently if given the chance is that
I would have tried to work more with the other interns rather then spending
a lot of my time doing research by myself. I also should have tried doing
more programming on my own while getting suggestions from others since I
probably learn better by trial and error then by just watching other people
code.

Has this program influenced or affected your plans for a career?

Since I am currently interested in further study and research in the
field of geophysics (I might want to research earthquakes and volcanoes), my
work at UseIT might have some similarities to what I could be doing in the
future so the earth science and geophysics aspects of the program could
provide good experience and preparation for the kind of career I'm
interested in. I'm not sure how much computer programming I will be
performing in the future but it is likely that I would want to use
visualization programs such as SCEC VDO and programs like Mathematica or
Matlab (which I haven't used this summer) so the computer experience will be useful as well.

What have you done in the UseIT program this summer?

So far this summer I have mainly worked on a project to display two
boxes representing the Anza seismic gap (an area where there were some
recent earthquakes but historically low seismicity compared to other
sections of the San Jacinto fault). But I'm also working on a movie
assessments project and plan on starting a project involving the graticule
(grid).