manuel salgado a phd student working with dr andrew klein in the department of geography at texas a&m university has led a non-traditional journey to higher-education today hes an experienced field researcher and teaching assistant and reflects on some of the challenges hes faced in his career early passion for science salgados passion for science was instilled at a very early age and his fascination with understanding how the world worked is what led him to pursing research and higher education i was always pretty curious at an early age and have wanted to be a scientist for as long as i can remember salgado said the idea of being able to figure out how the world works is extremely appealing to me when i was an undergrad at the university of new mexico (unm) i was fortunate that i had many professors who enabled my participation in their various research projects which helped me experience research firsthand he said i was pretty much hooked from then on journey to academia salgado experienced quite a few challenges prior to joining texas a&m geography im very much a non-traditional student; im pretty sure im the departments oldest current graduate student at 41 salgado said i didnt get a degree straight out of high school and instead tried out various jobs for about a decade at the age of 28 i went back to school at san antonio college and then two years later i transferred to the university of new mexico he said after undergrad i worked at a consulting firm in new mexico for a year before starting grad school here at a&m challenges while pursuing higher education salgado revealed his pathway to college was paved with many struggles my first attempt at college when i was 18 consisted of a semester at a community college where i did extremely poorly salgado said when i went back to school at 28 i did extremely well and i pretty much sailed through undergrad but grad school has been tough! i struggled with qualifying exams when i first arrived here salgado said after a change in departments and advisors i found a better fit with my current advisor andrew klein and he helped me get over that hurdle and i successfully completed my qualifying exams in addition to those challenges salgado discussed how other significant events affected his progress in research on top of that being that my research requires field measurements weve had to overcome a ton of obstacles in the field from incorrect gps measurements out of season weather events a government shutdown that led to a canceled field campaign and doing field work during the covid pandemic salgado said mapping snow in mountain environments salgados undergraduate senior thesis led him to choosing dr klein as an advisor while i was at unm i completed a senior thesis into how climate change was impacting snowpack and the streamflow that resulted from that snowpack melting salgado said dr kleins work with snow made him an excellent fit for me if i wanted to pursue that further once i transferred into the department of geography i had also spoken to a few of his former students who mentioned he was a great advisor who always looked out for his students so that made him an obvious choice salgados research focuses on assessing different aspects of snow distribution in mountainous regions using unmanned aerial vehicles (uavs) and 3d model visualizations my research involves the use of uavs in order to map snow in mountain environments and produce 3d models of the snow surface through a method known as structure from motion (sfm) salgado explained sfm involves the capturing of multiple images of an area from different angles then reconstructing the location of features located within those images in three dimensional space essentially we fly drones over an area of snow and take hundreds of pictures he said we use a gps system to capture centimeter-level accurate locations of targets we place in our field area and then we bring all that data back and use software to combine it and produce the 3d model by comparing models at different times we can see how the snow surface changes and by comparing the snow surface elevations to those of the same area with no snow we can calculate snow depth gaining experience from nasa field campaign salgado had the opportunity to participate in a nasa field campaign during his first year as a phd student which taught him the optimal direction of moving forward in his research my first year with dr klein we participated in a nasa field campaign called snowex salgado said my job during snowex was to use terrestrial lidar (tls) to scan study plots of snow tls scans produce 3d models of the snow surface these are usually highly accurate models he added however working with a large tls system in the snow is cumbersome and time consuming uavs on the other hand dont require you to move a heavy laser system through the snow over the course of a day but rather just require a short 20-minute flight to produce a very similar model