 What's your job?
The neatest thing about my job is a couple of things. One is going to places that have largely been untouched by humans. Everywhere on the Earth has been touched by humans in some way, but places that are so pure and pristine and just nature in its most rugged form, very few if any people go there. When you're standing on an ice sheet or the edge of an outlet glacier, or these massive icebergs are breaking off into the sea, you know you're looking at something that is truly a phenomenal process and part of the beauty that is planet Earth. So that's one thing. I would say the other is again looking at the Earth as a whole. These satellite images of the Earth, what we call the Blue Marble perspective — years ago when the first Apollo pictures came back of the Earth, that's what it looked like, a blue marble hanging in space — you see it very differently. You see a very thin fragile atmosphere; you see an interconnected system of parts, you know, from the densely populated coastal regions to the unpopulated center of Antarctica. When you look at the world in that way, I think you have a different appreciation for it. So, it comes back to being up close and personal to places most people never get a chance to see. That's one really neat thing. The other is being far away and somewhat removed, I guess, and viewing the Earth objectively from a distance.
My name is Waleed Abdalatii and I'm the director of the Earth Science and Observation Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder. I'm also an associate professor of geography at the university. My work involves working with satellites that look at the Earth, in particular the ice-covered parts to understand how the world is changing and, in particular, how the ice is changing and what that may mean for life on Earth itself in terms of sea level rise, global climate and things like that. So, basically I take a big-picture view — we sometimes say that satellites are like a macroscope as opposed to a microscope — to look at the Earth as a system and try to pick apart what's going on, why it's going on and what that means.
How did you find your passion?
I came to this almost accidentally. I was good in high school in math and science, so I went into engineering in college and worked for a few years as an engineer. Kind of was content and thought that would be it, but after a few years got hungry to learn more and one of the things I was working on was satellites — Earth-observing satellites — and I got real curious about about the science of what they were observing. I went back to graduate school in aerospace engineering, where I got my master's degree here at the University of Colorado. While I was doing that, I happened to take a class with a professor who did a lot of ice work — using satellites to look at ice; he also went to the Arctic sea ice a lot, the Greenland ice sheet — and we connected pretty nicely. I liked him, and he seemed to like me. He gave me the opportunity to work for a Ph.D, and from the moment I stepped foot on the Greenland ice sheet for the first time (a helicopter dropped me off), I was in love with it. It was a really powerful combination of techniques — the up-close, hands-on view with the far-away (space-based) perspective — for studying something that's so important in the global system. When I coupled that with the satisfaction of learning new things and the personal interactions I had with my fellow graduate students and adviser, I became immensely interested in it and made a career of it.
Why are you passionate about what you do?
What are the things about your work that aren't so cool?
There's nothing that really gets so dull or so routine that it takes away from the magic of what me and my colleagues are trying to do. However, at times, you know, pouring through reams and reams of data, or trying to write the computer program that doesn't work for reasons that, when you finally figure it out days later, were painfully obvious — that gets tiresome. Trying to get the funding, writing proposals to get the grants to do the things you know or believe are very interesting or fascinating ideas that will lead to new knowledge, that gets tiresome as well, but these are all necessary parts of moving forward.While they're not the favorite part of the job — and I really like to minimize that — at the same time I and, I think, all my colleagues recognize the importance of that as part of the path to discovery. So, we grit our teeth, smile and accept it.
Any advice?
I guess my advice for anyone who's really interested in their passions, particularly as a career, would be several things. First, be clear on what excites you and why it excites you — make sure it's not something that's fleeting and that isn't going to give you the energy or the patience to work through the really hard work to get there. The second is if you're really passionate about something, if it's really the right thing, it will energize you. It will give you the stimulus, the stimulation, to work through and do the hard work. If it's a passing thing or you’re really not that passionate at it, then you'll find it drains you with time, and everything takes hard work, so it's crucial you find the thing that energizes you so you can do that hard work. And if it really does energize you, if you're truly passionate about it, you'll get good at it. You may not be good at it at first, but if you can put in the effort, the time, the energy, you'll get good at it and it will be very satisfying to you. So, if it's something you're really excited about, and you understand why you're excited truly passionate about it, then I think dive in with both feet and don't look back.
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