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11 December 2013
AGU Fall Meeting 2013: Wednesday
Another busy day in the works! Today I’ll be checking out a new form of talks, the “Water Sciences Pop-Ups” (ED31F, 8-10AM in Moscone South 301). They’re five-minute student discussions about the future of water sciences, without the formality of a powerpoint, and I’m hoping they’ll be exciting and fast-paced.
AGU Fall Meeting 2013: Tuesday
So much to do today! This morning I went to my last student breakfast, and got to tell everyone about the Thriving Earth Exchange, which is a bit like Kickstarter for science (and focuses on bottom-up, community-driven research applications. The breakfast is also a great chance to network with section leaders (and even the President of AGU!) and get yourself noticed, and the food is free, so you really should drag yourself out of bed to go.
9 December 2013
AGU Fall Meeting 2013: Monday
I’m going to try out a new approach this year, and see if I can do some ‘liveblogging’ as I attend events rather than waiting until the end of the day to do a summary. I expect, in the nature of all confererncee blogging, thatI will end up getting worse and worse at updating as the day goes on, but it’s worth an attempt!
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2 December 2013
Social Media Roundup: AGU Fall Meeting 2013
It’s that time again! Less than a week until AGU’s Fall Meeting in San Francisco and my schedule is already full with a whole slew of great sessions, events and activities. As is my annual tradition, I’ve collected a list of various social-media-related items for you to peruse.
7 November 2013
Pumpkin ‘cratering’ and a farewell to Buffalo
Despite the frantic packing and last-minute paperwork of my last few days in Buffalo, I managed to take a little time on the last day to go watch a UB Geology tradition: pumpkin impact cratering. It’s an introductory lab that we usually try to do around Halloween, one that I remember teaching almost four years ago now, where students get to drop pumpkins off the roof of one of the buildings on camps and see what happens. Obviously there’s a lot more involved for the lab students – they very diligently measured the pumpkins and the resulting impact sites and cleaned up quite nicely afterwards – but as a departing grad, I got to enjoy the show without having to do any recording. It’s a fun lab and a relevant one, especially since we’ve recently seen what happens when even a relatively small body heads for the Earth.
15 October 2013
Ada Lovelace Day, “A Passion for Science”, and Earth Science Week
This year, Earth Science Week just happens to fall right before my (gasp!) final thesis defense. I’m deep into powerpoint construction and worrying myself crazy about the fact that that’s only a few more days away, but I have done something special this year to help celebrate the accomplishments of an Earth scientist – and, in this case, a woman. In light of the recent events concerning Dr. Danielle Lee and …
3 July 2013
Another dispatch from the IVM-Fund: 2013 Guatemala Trip Report
Any of you who’ve followed this blog for a while know that after doing my fieldwork in Guatemala, I worked with Dr. Jeff Witter to put his organization, the International Volcano Monitoring Fund (IVM-Fund), in touch with the fantastic folks at the Santiaguito Volcano Observatory and the Instituto Nacional de Sismología, Vulcanología, Meteorología e Hidrología (INSIVUMEH). Jeff’s organization is dedicated to supplying volcano observatories who lack funding with the tools to conduct critical volcano research and monitoring activities. After the initial introductions, my role has mainly been in a cheerleader, but I’m still always excited to see a new update about their activities. Jeff has been working in Guatemala for several years now, and what follows is summarized from his latest report on the IVM-Fund’s work with Guatemalan volcano observatories.
19 June 2013
Core Skills in the Geosciences: A Follow-up
Last April, I had a discussion with some of my fellow graduate students in the geology department here at UB about teaching. One topic raised by those of us working with senior undergraduates was the skills our students would need to have by the time they left the department. We realized that many students take winding paths on the way to finishing a major for various reasons, including that they transferred from another school, they switched majors, or they are double-majoring and have time conflicts. A winding path isn’t necessarily detrimental as long as the students come out of the process with a solid geoscience skillset. But what should that skillset include?
23 May 2013
Starting off the summer with a bang: More man-made maars
Today’s guest post was written by Alison Graettinger, a postdoc in the UB Geology department who’s working with the Center for Geohazard Studies. She was in charge of the series of maar-creation experiments I helped out at a few weeks ago, which are a followup to the experiments that I wrote about last year. She offered to put together this post so you could learn a bit about the science and international collaborations behind the experiments.
10 April 2013
Core skills for geology majors
A recent discussion that I’ve been having with my fellow grad students lately has been about this question: What are the core skills undergraduate geoscience students should have when they graduate?
Sometimes, because of crazy course schedules, majors joining the department late in their college career, etc etc., it seems like skillsets can be acquired haphazardly or in an order that doesn’t benefit the student. Those of us who teach as grad students sometimes find that it’s necessary to do more review than we’d expect when we’re dealing with a lab or a course. Although review isn’t a bad thing, it can take away time from the main course topics. As a teacher, my goal is to get my students to learn the course material as effectively and efficiently as possible – and make it stick.
So, like any good geoblogger, I’m going to ask for help ‘crowdsourcing’ the answer to this question. If you could put together a guide of core skills for geology students, what would be on it? What do you want them to know before they attempt specific classes? What should they know by the time they graduate to be well-grounded in the field?
Jessica Ball is a volcanologist at the U.S. Geological Survey, researching volcanic hydrothermal systems and stability, and doing science communication for the California Volcano Observatory. She previously worked at the Geological Society of America's Washington DC Policy Office, learning about the intersection of Earth science and legislative affairs. Her Mendenhall postdoc and PhD focused on how water affects the stability of volcanoes, and involved both field investigations and numerical modeling applications. Her blogging covers a range of topics, from her experiences in academic geosciences to science outreach and communication to her field and lab work in volcanology.