October 1997

... I will probably be at next year's (GSA) as well though, and maybe the next Goldschmidt conference in Tolouse. I have decided to continue my education towards a Ph.D. immediately after finishing here. I am hoping to stay here for another semester to TA and take a class - I need to take Differential Equations again, I did not do nearly well enough the first time, and have found it to be critical to the long-term work I am interested in (emphasize this to current students as you see fit). I have been in touch with professors at a couple different schools who have tentatively offered me research assistantships - at SUNY Stony Brook and Virginia Tech. I am also talking to people at Dartmouth, University of Minnesota, and University of Idaho about projects and funding. I will be looking into work at Penn State, Ohio State, and Yale at GSA - trying to keep my options open and making sure I am in the right place doing something I am interested in. Most of the projects I am considering are in the areas of heavy metal/ radionuclide chemistry - sorption, complexation, partition coefficient work and subsequent transport mechanisms and modeling water/rock interaction. In a more applied setting I have been looking into studying Acid Mine Drainage systems, Yucca Mountain research, and some pyrite, silica sorption, kinetic, partitioning studies. It is all quite interesting, I will let you know when I decide on a school and project.

August 1997

... I am presenting my thesis material at GSA in Salt Lake City this year, it will be in the Tuesday (October 21) moring poster session. The title is: the chemistry of geothermal springs in the Idaho Batholith. Let me know if you plan on attending the meeting this year, perhaps we could get together for lunch or something. In update, the thesis is coming along, albeit slower than I would like, and I am still trying to finish this semester, although I have a bad feeling that will not happen. Learning, using, screwing up, and redoing computer simulation work has taken up a tremendous amount of time with little to show for it with the possible exception that I now know how to use a few programs that are user-hostile. I am TAing again this semester as well as working part time as a lab jockey doing somw work with kinetic experiments on t-DCE degredation with zero-valent iron. I am finished with classwork, so pretty much all I do is thesis and work related - which has been fun, even if frustrating from time to time.

druschel@wsunix.wsu.edu