One down, three to go!

It's now been a year since I started my PhD here at the University of Liverpool. To commemorate the occasion, I thought it would be great to list some interesting numbers related to all the things I have managed to do in that time. Here goes:

• Published 1 paper based on the work I did for my masters thesis at the University of Oxford. I'm delighted to finally have it published and very thankful for Tamsin Mather, David Pyle, Nick Varley, Patrick Smith and Emma Liu for all their help! 
• Attended 3 conferences: VMSG in Edinburgh in January, EGU in Vienna in April, and BGA right here in the University of Liverpool.
• Attended no less than 6 workshops: the workshops covered a wide range of topics (e.g. environmental geophysics, volcano deformation, magma, glasses and melts) and took me across Europe (e.g. Lake District, Iceland and Munich). 
• Started this very blog in April, and this is post number 6. I have no plans to stop any time soon!
• Visited 7 countries: For fieldwork, conferences and workshops, I have visited all of Mexico, Iceland, Germany, Austria, France, Ireland and Scotland*.
• Witnessed 12 volcanic explosions in Colima, a simply unforgettable experience. 
• Downloaded 213 peer-reviewed publications**. 
• Flown on 15 flights, racking up a total of 18,718 airmiles***, enough to get me three quarters of the way around the world.
• Using the data I have so far, I have identified and analysed 605,551 volcanic earthquakes from three separate volcanoes (Mt St Helens, Mt. Unzen, and Volcan de Colima). Mt St Helens is responsible for a huge majority of those, with 581,343 events over the 16 month period I looked at. 

Writing that list has made me realize just how intense yet fun my first year has been. I'm already really excited to see what the second year is going to be like. There are already plans to visit Guatemala and visit the ever-active Santiaguito volcano, and then revisit Colima afterwards. I have at least two more papers in the pipeline, and hopefully many more after that. If all goes to plan, I should be starting laboratory experiments very soon, breaking rock samples under various conditions. I am already planning to visit at least two conferences, VMSG and EGU 2015, and I can't wait to see old friends and make new ones again.

All in all, I've really enjoyed the first year of my PhD adventure and I still have so much more to look forward to in the near future.

One of the explosions from Volcan de Colima which I witnessed from it's flanks. 

* I know they said no to independence, but I still think of Scotland as a separate country!
** I use Mendeley to organise my papers, and I simply counted how many I've downloaded since last year.
*** Calculated using http://www.webflyer.com/travel/mileage_calculator/