Mars One program and Graduate School program

Today I got an email which started with these sentences: 

"Did you know US astronaut Clayton Anderson was rejected by NASA for its astronaut training program 15 times, yet in 2007 he boarded the Space Shuttle Atlantis for a trip to the International Space Station. He proved anything can happen and no door is ever completely closed..."

Yes, my one way ticket to Mars did not get approved. So I guess I will not be one the astronauts who suppose to go to Mars in 2023. Over 200,000 people from all around the world applied to the Mars One program. In the initial round (four round totally) they chose 1058 applicants which means the chance of being in the first round is around %0.5! In the first round, of the chosen few, 586 are male and 472 are female with the majority age range between 26-35, although %10 of the pool are over 46. 
Still there is a slight chance to be part of Mars One program. They will reopen the application process again in late 2014. By 2015, sixteen teams of four individuals will be selected for seven years of full time training and eventually 4 of them (2 men and 2 women) will be selected to be the first humans who will settle on Mars. I was thinking why I wasn't one of them and thought they just needed to check my amazon account, apparently amazon doesn't offer prime membership in Mars! 

I made this graph which shows the percentage of total applicants by country (for higher quality please click on it). 

The complete criteria for choosing astronauts are here (and the main part in the table below), which I found interesting. I think in some ways this table pretty much represents the characteristics of a graduate student! These days I'm working on my resolution for the new year and I diffidently like to apply these attributes in my life on Earth. 

Five Key Characteristics of an Astronaut

Characteristic	Practical Applications
Resiliency	Your thought processes are persistent. You persevere and remain productive. You see the connection between your internal and external self. You are at your best when things are at their worst. You have indomitable spirit. You understand the purpose of actions may not be clear in the moment, but there is good reason—you trust those who guide you. You have a “Can do!” attitude.
Adaptability	You adapt to situations and individuals, while taking into account the context of the situation. You know your boundaries, and how/when to extend them. You are open and tolerant of ideas and approaches different from your own. You draw from the unique nature of individual cultural backgrounds.
Curiosity	You ask questions to understand, not to simply get answers. You are transferring knowledge to others, not simply showcasing what you know or what others do not.
Ability to Trust	You trust in yourself and maintain trust in others. Your trust is built upon good judgment. You have self-informed trust. Your reflection on previous experiences helps to inform the exchange of trust.
Creativity / Resourcefulness	You are flexible in how an issue / problem / situation is approached. You are not constrained by the way you were initially taught when seeking solutions. Your humor is a creative resource, used appropriately as an emerging contextual response. You have a good sense of play and spirit of playfulness. You are aware of different forms of creativity.

Term projects

Personally I am very pro for term projects. For me, at least, helps to practice what I'v learned in the course of the semester. During the semester you are learning (or may be just encountering) lots of ideas and it would be ideal if you learn how to execute them. Even for some people ideas are worthless unless executed. In one of our courses in this semester we learned about limnology. Actually the objective of the course was much broader and limnology was just part of that. I just wanted to give you a sense of this class (Yes, I'm deeply thankful for our professor). Part of this class was accomplishing an analysis on a well studied reservoir and writing a paper in a standard format. Class was grouped up in several teams (not to mention that this helps teamwork as well - believe me, working as a team is much harder than you think. Sometimes you need to redo all things you've done already, but its fun! :)). Each team should prepare a write up and also a presentation for their work. Its very nice when you can see and use actual data and come up with new ideas beside developing skills you learned. At this moment we are in the middle of our write up section and I think we will have a wonderful term project. 

I made a video for some of the data we already processed:

I also made an interactive plot for visualizing rainfall data for the period that project was defined. For best experience please open it with Firefox browser. Select a time span or date you would like to see by holding the left button of your mouse (unless you are left handed and switched the button configuration) and double click to come back to the full graph. Ill have an update for this post. Let me know if you have any questions or ideas.