Hi! 

I am Ana Širovic and you will be reading my diaries from the 2 SO GLOBEC cruises in 
2002: the LMG02-01A mooring cruise (Feb 5 – Mar 3) and the NBP02-02 survey cruise 
(Apr 9 – May 21).  I will be explaining the acronyms in my diary entries later on, but first 
allow me to introduce myself.

I am a second year graduate student working on a Ph.D. in oceanography at Scripps 
Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, California.  I have a B.A. in Creative Studies 
(with biology emphasis) from University of California Santa Barbara.  For the first 
couple of years of my college life, however, my major was electrical engineering at 
University of Zagreb's School for Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.  (I 
should point out that I was born and raised in Zagreb, Croatia and I only moved to the US 
three and a half years ago.)  In any case, it is my strange mix of engineering and biology 
that brought me to my current work: whale acoustics.  Frequent trips to sea are a big part 
of my degree work and they are definitely my favorite part of the job.  These two cruises 
will be my third and fourth trips to the amazing Antarctic continent.   

When I'm not out at sea, most of the activities I enjoy are still very closely linked to the 
ocean.  Just like some 95% of students at Scripps, I have a surfboard in my office so I am 
working on my five-year plan of learning to surf.  I also love SCUBA diving and 
swimming.  I do have a few non-ocean related passtimes, too.  Traveling is one of them 
and I tend to have 3-4 trips planned at any point in time.  I also like learning foreign 
languages.  I hope you will remember, in case you come across some weird expressions 
while reading my diary, that English is a foreign language to me and sometimes I 
translate things literally from Croatian, which unfortunately doesn't always work as well 
as I would expect.