PROMOTING SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY BETWEEN INDIA AND THE U.S.

Shravya Srivastava Summer 2018 Blog

This past summer I worked at Hughes Lab in Department of Earth Sciences, University of California, Riverside. Riverside is a very big county but the city Riverside that I had the privilege of living in was a quaint little town. It was a beautiful town with all the basic amenities in form of shops available at perfect convenience. The public transport facility of Riverside Transit Agency buses was amazing. I bought the R’card from the UCR Card Services for 25$ and I was set for the whole of my stay. I could even visit the recreation center and get discounts because of the R’card. It was a wise decision to get that as soon as my official on-boarding was completed at UCR. I cannot imagine how they manage it but they had free Wi-Fi and charging ports inside each bus, be it commuter-link or regular bus service. It was very easy to navigate the bus system throughout the city. I even visited the small towns nearby using the RTA bus.

Riverside had its own range of supermarkets like Trader Joe’s, Stater Bros, Maxi foods etc. and also some Indian food stores namely India Sweets and Spices and New India Sweets and Spices. The nearest mall was Galleria at Tyler Street which was an hour ride on the RTA bus. My accommodation was at a pretty little house in a very good neighborhood. It was about 4 miles from the University but I had a very easy route to navigate on the bus. The people are very amiable in Riverside, there is no worry and no anguish among them. Riverside has people from various communities including Mexicans, Americans, Indians, Canadians and Asians. This leads to a very interesting social interaction pool for anyone. The beautiful Fairmont Park just a few streets down from my house had a pretty lake with boating facility boasting an amazing view for sunrise and sunset. I could view the stunning Mt. Rubiduox with the missionary cross atop it from my house. It was a good place for hiking but alas I didn’t have any gear for such activity and I didn’t 1want to venture out there over the highly weathered rocks without any preparation. The mountain also had a very interesting spot on it marking the letter C for California on it. I visited San Clemente Beach with my lab mates during one weekend. It is a really amazing beach spot with some cool geological features on the cliffs before the beach starts. There were amazing exposures of trace fossils, paleosols, fault displacements and flame sedimentary structures.

I really loved one special place that first opened in 1948 in Riverside. The place was called Mr.T’s restaurant. I loved having breakfast over there with my guide on few weekends. The pancakes at Mr.T’s are to die for. I also loved the menu at New India Sweets and Spices which had the bonus of being a supermarket for Indian food items too. There was a strange Mexican food place near my house named Tios Tacos. It had some very interesting artistic sculptures made out of waste. They also had the most amazing Mexican food I have ever had. I was very happy in discovering that Mexican and Indian cuisine have many spices in common. Many of my weekends were spent watching movies at the University Village or shopping for clothes at nearest Walmart or trying new types of food around the town. I have tried Pho of Vietnamese cuisine, Thai red curry and some Mongolian grill and barbecue. In the end there is always the evergreen desert, frozen yogurt. I was surprised to see that the Yogurtland had different stations of different flavored frozen yogurt you could fill your cup up with and pay by weight.

Research at the Hughes Lab was all I could dream of. Laid back thought process with the flare of being about 540 million year old animals. The trilobites that I was studying were the less studied ones with only one or two localities they are found in. The charm of this work was not only that these were 30 year old pictures of 540 million year old fossils but also that their anatomy was very different from their closest relatives and other trilobites. It was really fun to work with Dr.Hughes and his graduate students who all had a very relaxed yet insightful process to the research. Problem solving was a fun activity for them and they enjoyed visiting museums and collections on their free time. I had the privilege of joining them on expeditions to the LA County Museum collections facility in search for cool specimens of disarticulate fossils. There was also an event where some delegates from Thailand visited the Hughes Lab for museum exploration. I learnt some really cool stuff about many facets of Paleontology in addition to my own subject interest.

The first good habit I acquired would include me trying my best to be on time at places and winning that challenge with myself too. The worldly things like movies and serials were taking a backseat to my work. At the same time, I learnt the real meaning of having a weekend. Weekends are supposed to be the time when you take a break from the hectic office life and refresh your minds to new things. I never did follow this motto back at home and so I used to work non-stop even on weekends. I hope I can keep up this laid back approach to life when I get back to my studies. Working in the Hughes Lab allowed me to learn the basic process of solving problems faced during normal research work routine. The software that I was using for my analysis was not able to understand the data that I was feeding in and thus we were getting some very erroneous results. But this was easily solved by understanding what the real data looks like and what the software wants, i.e. the syntax errors. Thinking in right direction always solves the most trivial problems easily. The best thing that I brought back from the States was the habit of smiling at every passersby or asking how they are doing. The simple task of being kind to others brings about great changes in their and your own day. I could always see how happy the bus driver was as I said thanks to them for taking me to my desired stop. It is these little things that made my stay in the quiet little town of Riverside a really memorable one.

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