Last week marked the completion of my graduate course requirements for my MSc program. Although I may decide to take courses over the next year for personal interest’s sake, this still felt like a huge milestone in this whole Master’s process. And the completion of this “final” course felt particularly rewarding. It was a three week intensive hydrogeology field school that draws students from around the world. Although some of the program was redundant to UW students, it was still a good learning opportunity – especially in terms of teamwork. Nothing says “work together” more than randomly assigned groups for an entire course and all-night pumping and recovery test monitoring. This brought on some necessary bonding between our classmates and I think we all came away from the field school having not only made excellent networking connections, but good friends.Photographed above is Lake Marie near Elmira, the site where we studied groundwater-surface water interaction using seepage meters and mini piezometers. I this was also my first opportunity to see v-notch weirs in the field and measure stream flow via dilution gauging. It was rather beautiful so that didn’t hurt one bit.
Cailin Hillier 