Maria Brumm has a Master's degree... in Science! She wrote her thesis on 
- The buzz in the geoblogosphere this week has been about an article in Nature Geoscience on the status of women in the academic earth sciences. I meant to review it here, but haven't had the oomph. Instead, you should join the discussion at All My Faults are Stress-Related, Ten Million Years of Solitude, and The Dynamic Earth. One point that hasn't been discussed much yet is that graduate school in the earth sciences is actually freakishly egalitarian - unlike other fields, we do not see large-scale gender fractionation between the master's and Ph.D. As a Ph.D. noncompleter I was tremendously relieved to hear this, but I still don't know what to make of it - what are we doing right?
- There's a total lunar eclipse tonight, and it's the last total lunar eclipse any of us in North America will be getting until December 2010. According to NASA, the recent dearth of volcanic eruptions means that this one is likely to be especially lurid.
Carnivals and miscellanea below the fold.
- Geoscientist Gigapan Opportunity -- Interested in the scientific applications of absurdly huge panoramic images? There's a conspiracy afoot and you can be part of it!
- I'd like to see some of you gigapan geologists make stereographic projections of your images, too. They look insanely cool and I'm sure there's pedagogical value in there... somewhere.
- Oekologie #14 -- the carnival of ecology
- Feminist Carnival #53 -- The A-Z of the feminist blogosphere
- Your Accretionary Wedge entries are due on Saturday -- the theme this month is "Things That Make You Go Hmm". Which is an excellent theme and I am looking forward to writing my entry, but freakin' C&C Music Factory cassette showing up during a freakin' formative stage of my early adolescence, freakin' freak augh... yeah. Aa-augh... yeah.
- Some suggestions on training for the beyond-lab aspects of science -- "Trainees, you think your advisers should know that they should be teaching you how to write grants. Advisers, you think your students should just know that they should go to seminars or that if you think out loud about a particular problem you are experiencing they should just know that this is your way of training them. Screw that."
- Tactile illusions -- Experiment at home!
Education & Careers
Comments
A lot of my students, both male and female, have planned to get terminal master's degrees from the start, because the M.S. is a good degree for industry. Is that less true in the other sciences? Does the bio-medical industry employ mostly Ph.D.s? (And if that's the case, it doesn't necessarily mean that the geosciences are doing better... it means that male students have a good reason to leave with a M.S. and make gobs of money.)
Posted by: Kim | February 20, 2008 3:56 PM
Presumably female students who leave with an M.S. will also make gobs of money - or so I hope. Unless we do something silly like try to write for a living. But yes, the relative prestige of an M.S. in this field is probably relevant.
Posted by: Maria Brumm | February 20, 2008 4:13 PM
Maria, from what is "Nom" derived? Nomination? Nom de plume? The sound that Cookie Monster makes when he is eating something tasty?
Posted by: Ellery | February 20, 2008 9:38 PM
Your last guess is pretty much spot on.
Posted by: Maria Brumm | February 20, 2008 10:40 PM