STUDENT’S VOICE Reinvigorating
Washington and Lee’s AAPG Chapter
Franklin Wolfe, SA-4334
wolfef16@mail.wlu.edu
This is currently an exciting time for our AAPG Student Chapter. During the 2013-2014 school year, our chapter was dormant. In Fall 2014, our former president Andy Roberts took the initiative to reboot our chapter by holding officer elections and the first chapter meetings in over two years. Still, our chapter remained somewhat inactive throughout the 2013-2014 school year as we struggled to obtain funding from the university. Despite this setback, we made great strides to rebuild our student membership and participation, met monthly throughout the year, and took actions to ensure a productive 2015-2016 school year.
The 2015-2016 school year began strongly thanks to a gen- erous grant from the L. Austin Weeks Undergraduate Grant Program for Student Chapters for which I had applied the previous spring. As our chapter president I set our first course of action to elect additional, new officers: Marshall Woodward (Vice President), Joe Beninati (Treasurer), and Andrew Clements (Secretary). The officers then met to make plans for the 2015-2016 school year. At that meeting, we devoted our energies toward identifying ways to strengthen outreach of our AAPG student chapter on campus, such as providing educational opportunities, promoting communication among members, and helping members to build a network of individu- als with whom they share interests.
For example, each morning, the Chapter’s new energy industry newsletter is emailed to all members and some select non-members (51 total recipients). The newsletter includes The Energy Journal by Christopher Harder from the Wall Street Journal and links to additional energy articles selected from websites such as Forbes (
http://www.forbes.com) and Breaking Energy (
http://breakingenergy.com). Chapter news and information about upcoming key events sponsored by the Washington and Lee Geology Department are also com- municated. The newsletter has been a great success and has sparked conversations and inspired members to seek and share additional, related articles through the newsletter.
In Fall 2015, we hosted a session on opportunities and plan- ning for graduate school that brought together students and professors of the Washington and Lee Geology Department; 25 students and 4 professors attended. Students had the oppor- tunity to hear from professors about their experiences and to gain knowledge first-hand about the graduate level research environment. Students gained a better understanding about how the application process works, including how to contact graduate school professors about openings in their programs. Personally, this helped me search for potential graduate schools with a critical perspective and better prepare for find- ing programs I felt would be good fit for me.
42 TPG
Apr.May.Jun 2016
Lastly, we laid the groundwork for a productive winter semester. This semester we will host Dr. Seth Cantey, Assist- ant Professor of Politics at Washington and Lee who specializes in Middle Eastern Politics and American Foreign Policy. He and Dr. Christopher Connors (Geology Department Head and AAPG Faculty Representative) will participate in on a panel to discuss the impact that petroleum has on global politics with an emphasis on OPEC, the Middle East, and America’s relationship with this region. We will advertise this special program to the entire student body and anticipate students outside of our AAPG chapter, such as those majoring in politics, to attend. In April, we will host Andrew Head, a Washington and Lee senior who heads the Williams Investment Society’s a portion of the school’s endowment in the energy sector. He will deliver a ‘market report’ on the energy industry with an emphasis on the current situation of low-energy prices in global markets. Our last event will be feature the AAPG Distinguished Lecturer, Barney Issen, who has over 3+ decades of experience at Chevron. He will deliver a talk on 3D seismic interpretation.
We are excited about these unique opportunities to learn about the geologic, political, and economic aspects of the petro- leum industry. We hope that the progress that our chapter has made this year, building off the momentum of the previous year, will inspire the officers next year to take the chapter one step further. We have learned that having an active AAPG Chapter on campus goes a long way in supplementing the classroom experience with additional learning opportunities. I encourage geology departments without student chapters to take the initiative to start their own. Further, I also encour- age preexisting chapters to look for ways to reach their full potential by increasing student involvement and hosting a diverse range of educational opportunities.
How can we invigorate our AIPG inactive student chapters?
Members of the Washington and Lee Geology Department and AAPG Student Chapter get together for a group photo at last year’s end of the year celebration.
www.aipg.org
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