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12 March 2018
Improving the interview-a-scientist assignment
Nearly every scientist who’s active on social media or blogging gets requests from students to answer questions for interview-a-scientist assignments. Now, I love the intent of these assignments, which is to get students excited about a science topic by connecting them with an actual living, breathing scientists. However, the execution can be a problem for the scientists.
27 April 2015
Things you learn doing outreach
A short, light post this time. I’ll be doing an outreach event as a USGS rep in a couple of weeks, and having done the demo once already at AAAS’s 2015 Family Science Days, I was thinking about the things I learned last time. Some of these have also applied to other outreach I’ve done (I love doing video chats with students and science clubs, especially if I can get people excited about geology!)
24 January 2014
We’ve got to nominate!
Or, why I’m embarrassed that I’ve never submitted (or supported) a nomination for the AGU Honors Program – and why I’m going to make an effort to change that.
22 December 2007
A journey of a thousand miles…
I’ve been contemplating, for some time, starting a blog about my experiences as a female geologist (and continuing geology student). I’ve recently discovered a number of other geology and science-related blogs, and I find their discourse stimulating, informative, and in many cases enlightening. It’s useful to me as a student to have insight into the thoughts of professors and older scientists, and it’s often easier to discover it through print …
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.