Wednesday, August 14, 2024
After graduating in 2022, Gatesville High School alumnus Scout Key knew that she wanted to explore opportunities outside of her hometown.
Key is currently an upcoming junior at the University of Texas at Austin, where she plans to graduate early. She is a mathematics major and expressed that she chose this path because math is something she enjoys, and it can be applied to different fields.
During her time at UT Austin, she was given the option to apply for a research program at the National Weather Center at Oklahoma University.
Out of all the students who applied for the program, Key was the only person from UT Austin to be selected for the prestigious program.
The research program is called the National Weather Center Research Experience for Undergraduates at Oklahoma University (NWC REU), which is sponsored by the National Science Foundation.
Key resided in Norman, OK, for 10 weeks from late May to early August to attend the program.
“It was important in order to expose myself to a line of work that I have been interested in for many years, and in the process, I was able to meet many wonderful people within the field of meteorology who gave me advice and perspective that I would not have been able to gain otherwise,” she said.
The NWC REU program invited various meteorologists from different career paths to talk to the students about their experiences and job descriptions. This included lead weather forecasters for the National Weather Service (NWS), data scientists for private companies, researchers from the labs and projects at OU, as well as the individual who was the main meteorologist that helped on the set of the new movie, “Twisters,” which was released on July 19 of this year.
Key expressed that the meteorologist took cast members Glen Powell and Daisy Edgar Jones storm chasing to prepare for the movie.
Since being a researcher in the program, she was able to attend the early showing and movie premiere for Twisters at the Warren Theatre in Moore, OK. At the special early screening, a live Q&A session was held with the cast from the movie.
“It was amazing,” she said. “The Warren Theatre in Moore, by the way, had been hit by the infamous Moore EF5 tornado back in 2013.”
She mentioned that during the showing at the movie premiere, the audience directly shouted out individuals’ names who were in the movie that she had met at the NWC and within the actual movie itself. It was a special moment for her since many of the background characters and a few shots were either done within the NWC or had actual NWC meteorologists in the movie.
“A lot of the meteorology community showed up to the early screening, so watching a movie with the specialists who have a passion for what is being depicted is something special that I am truly lucky to have been able to experience,” she said.
During her time at the National Weather Center, she researched how broadcast meteorologists engage in what geographers call place-making in times of severe weather, and how the gender of the broadcast meteorologist affects the ways they place-make and how this affects the viewers at home.
“For the program, we had to present a 30-second, five-minute, and full conference length 12-minute talk over our research, as well as a full 10-page paper to send into a conference of choice, which we are required to attend,” she said. “We also had typical responsibilities like showing up for 40 hours a week and writing deadlines for our papers.”
Key believes that she gained invaluable insight into how the field of meteorology operates, as well as an experience of the research process that she will never forget.
“I had never conducted research prior to this, so having a team of mentors and program directors dedicated to our success to help me in this process was more than I could've ever asked for,” she said. “It gave me a positive experience with the process, which will impact if I decide to do more research in my career moving forward.”
She expressed that she also gained more technical skills as well, while having attended many programming workshops for different languages such as Python and R, as well as workshops on gathering past research to build her projects off of and how to write papersw in the proper format and style.
“The best part of being in this program was 100 percent the people I was able to meet,” she said. “So many people, including the other students as well as my mentors and other professionals within the field, were so passionate about the weather and what they were doing within the field, and getting to listen to them about what they were working on and their experiences within the field of meteorology was a joy.”
She explained that her time in the program has made her begin to consider going to graduate school for meteorology, or something in a similar field.
“Before attending this program, grad school was something that seemed far out of reach for me, but after learning about stipends provided to students and the different types of research that are available to study, I believe I would enjoy doing research in the near future,” she said.
She said that she has met a lot of individuals from non-traditional backgrounds who are either in graduate school right now or have begun a career within meteorology as well.
“I suppose I had it in my head before that one could only be successful in this field if you take a very specific path, but that is definitely not the case,” she said. “In fact, many of the students selected to be in the program with me were students within two-year community colleges, and I talked to a woman who was in this program last year who entered it right as she turned 30 with two kids.”
“So, I guess this is to say that it's never too late to chase a dream or take an opportunity, and I believe this is becoming more and more the case as time goes on,” she said.
