Shaking Up The World!

Drawn by: Judy Tran

In Abellaine Murti’s own words, here’s her summer experience as a Caltech Earthquake Fellow!

Walking past the pillar-like fixture, Caltech Hall, I made it to our room—Arms 251—just as the clock struck 9 AM. There, I gathered with my group of other Earthquake Fellows and our postdoc mentors, stepping into the role of a scientific researcher.

One day we were out in the field, shoveling out dirt to place geophone nodes, seismometers that would collect valuable data from The Weeknd’s concert. The next day I was hunched over my laptop, typing out code in Python Jupyter notebooks to create seismograms of our data. When the visual representations popped up, my group and mentors gathered round, pitching our hypotheses for the origins of the bright yellow pulses.

I learned advanced techniques like particle motion and beam forming, helping our group narrow down the specific source of the concert tremors. I initiated our own jump test to see if we could recreate our data collected—fully morphing into a researcher.

As I presented our findings to the crowd of mystified parents and seismologists at the end of the fellowship, I realized I had transformed into a researcher, yes, but also grew as a student, becoming more adventurous, curious, and driven to pursue the field of interdisciplinary computer science research.