You are browsing the archive for geology Archives - Magma Cum Laude.
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?
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?
8 March 2013
My experience as a woman in the geosciences
Being deep in the throes of thesis-wrangling has left me little time for blogging lately, but as a woman and a geoscientist I definitely thought it was important to write a little bit about International Women’s Day, and about my own experiences. I first became aware that this was a day of celebration when my graduate advisor and I encountered a parade in downtown Xela when we were in Guatemala doing fieldwork for my thesis. It was a beautiful day and the parade-goers were lively and excited and enthused.
24 February 2013
So you want to be a volcanologist?
In addition to my blogging and on-again-off-again relationship with Twitter, I like to take my geologizing to places outside the office. Just yesterday, I had the opportunity to talk with a girls’ STEM club at my old elementary school about being a volcanologist. I actually do this fairly often, and I’m always really impressed by the questions the students come up with. They’re always inquisitive and thoughtful, and often catch me off guard – which is good!
17 August 2012
So you’re a new geosciences grad student…
So you’re a new geosciences grad student…and you’re getting ready to start your first semester! Hopefully you’ve chosen a great department and surrounded yourself with professors and students who will excite and challenge you. You’re probably also plowing through a bunch of paperwork and maybe taking a training course on how to be a teaching/graduate/research/etc. assistant. If, at some point in all this, you say “What the heck did I get myself into?” and start feeling panicky, don’t worry – we all do this. Here are a few things to remember as you dive into the deep end of the pool:
30 June 2012
Accretionary Wedge #47: Nostalgia for notetaking
Jennifer at Fuzzy Science is hosting this month’s Accretionary Wedge, and this time we’re talking about field notes. For me, this is a pretty nostalgic discussion, since I haven’t been out do to field work for my own research since 2010. I’ve been on field trips since then, certainly, but notetaking sometimes gets sidelined in favor of other trip activities when you’re not doing it for work or research. Also, my research right now involves a lot of time dealing with computer simulations, so I still take lab notes, but they’re not like recording a field experience.
4 April 2012
Talking with undergrads about ‘nontraditional’ careers in the geosciences
So for anyone who was interested, my careers talk back in March went pretty well. It was an intro class, so I’m assuming that getting any of them to ask questions right before lunch was a success! Because this was an intro class, I went in with the assumption that very few of the students had any real conception of what a geologist ends up doing aside from what they see in the movies (bad examples for the most part) and what they experience in classes (teachers they see a few times a week but don’t have time to connect with). I presented a very linear concept of a geological career: take classes, get a degree, go into government or industry work OR get another degree, teach or do one of the former two options. Then I showed them the list of everyone I could find who got creative with their geologic experience.
25 March 2012
Geologist’s bookshelf: Older offerings
I’m a bit of a pack rat when it comes to books, especially geological ones. I’ve got quite a few that I’ve collected but never really had time to read. (When you read journal articles at work all day, sometimes you really don’t want to read about more geology when you go home. Because I also have a lot of fantasy and scifi books, those are what tend to end up on the bedside table instead.) More often then not, the books I collect are older, because buying a lot of new ones can get expensive when you’re on a grad student budget.
13 February 2012
Archival Gold: U.S. Antarctic Program Photo Library
It’s finally decided to act wintry in Buffalo, so I decided to continue the theme with (finally!) another photo archive post. This one comes to you courtesy of the U. S. Antarctic Program (part of the NSF’s Office of Polar Programs). The U.S. Antarctic Program Photo Library is a collection of images from research expeditions to Antarctica (submitted by members of those expeditions). It includes photos focusing on science, research stations, wildlife (above and below the ice!), scenery, people, and images from historical expeditions. Properly credited photos are free for use for non-commercial purposes, and you can submit your own photos to the collection (although they become the property of the NSF if you do).
13 November 2011
Archival Gold: Imaggeo
I’ve run through quite a few of my royalty-free geoscience photo resources, but Erik Klemetti and Matt Hall mentioned a new one this week: Imaggeo, an open-access collection maintained by the European Geosciences Union. The photo collection is currently small, but the photo quality is top-notch.
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.