Morehead City

I'm getting more and more anxious to get out of Chapel Hill and back to the Institute of Marine Sciences in Morehead City. That'll happen in May, after I finish the semester. In part it's because I'm anxious to get started on some field work again, and partly because I feel a need to settle down somewhere, for at least a few years.

Unfortunately, Morehead City has been described as the "black hole of dating" by other grad students. Most of the complaints I've heard have come from women, though. I think it's worse for them, because there are more girls than guys at the various labs (UNC, Duke, NCSU, NOAA) and women are, perhaps stereotypically, more concerned with dating someone of the same or better educational and socio-economic status, and in such a small town there just aren't that many options.

My advisor is heavily involved with NOAA and the government in figuring out what happened with Katrina, and preventing it from happening again. Our lab is doing much of the storm surge modeling work, and I expect I'll get pulled into that in the summer, which could be fun. I'm not sure it'll lead to my own dissertation, though, because I don't really think that's what I want to do.