Rebekah Harries

My time at University

Image

I loved studying in Edinburgh, I learned so much there. I had an amazing supervisor and supervisory team. Professor Linda Kirstein is just the best.

There were so many GeoSciences PhD students. We worked in the attic study space in the Grant Institute which has like fifty different PhD students up there. It’s got a very good energy and you feel supported. And I think it’s so important when you do a PhD to have that community around you.

I started life being interested in sedimentology. That's basically where you study the sediments left behind by rivers and glaciers. They kind of build records of sediment in the landscape. What's happened with those sediments in the past could tell us how sensitively the Earth's surface can respond to things like climate change, or an increase in tectonic activity in earthquakes.

And so, you go and you look at the sediments, and you try to interpret something about a landscape. Maybe the grain size got bigger through time, or there was more sediment deposited through time, and you try to glean little bits of information.

When you try and do that, you have to make a lot of assumptions. It’s really hard to go to a big block of sediment and say, ‘That particular feature means that the landscape was like this’. You have to use your imagination. When I finished my master’s, I was kind of annoyed by that. And so, my whole PhD was trying to understand what we can actually interpret from those sedimentary records in rivers.

My experiences since leaving University

I moved to Chile to work with a natural hazards research institute. I worked there for three and a half years. And I wanted to look at how climate shifts can impact river sediment transport. But with the pandemic, we ended up not being able to do all of the fieldwork for that project. And so, we switched it to a longer timescale and looked at the impact of climate on the evolution of mountain relief and bedrock river morphology.

And in that project, we did some really cool mathematical modelling of a mountain range and looked at how tectonics is recorded in the landscape. Like, if you have a fault in the landscape, is that recorded in the river profile? And if it's not, then maybe climate is really important for modulating that.

Alumni wisdom

To have an enjoyable PhD experience, I think you have to develop a hard skin, maybe. And also surround yourself with people that are enthusiastic and supportive.

So, I think it doesn't really matter what your PhD subject is in the end. The most important thing is your supervisory team. Find a way to scout out who your supervisors might be, or to target someone specifically that you think is really good to work with. That would be my top recommendation.