LETTER TO STUDENTS Filling Your Toolkit……..


Thomas A. Herbert, Ph.D., P.G., CPG-2551; AIPG John T. Galey, Sr., Public Service Award, 2018


Thomas A. Herbert, PhD, P.G., CPG has been a geologist for 53 years and active in many professional geology organizations since joining AIPG in 1973. He has 40 years of consulting for public and corporate clients. He has taught for 30 years as a courtesy professor at Florida State and provides mentoring and help with job placement. His free time is for reading history and new fiction of all flavors.


For the past 30 years or so I have been teaching at Florida State University here in Tallahassee as an adjunct professor in the Geology Department, then Geosciences, and now in the Earth Oceans and Atmospheric Sciences Department. The faculty has gone from 15 to about 60 in the new format and there is a $75 million building to be finished next year that has everyone excited. My role is to help with the understand- ing of the commercial aspects of our profession and to provide employment and career ideas for students. I have been a geolo- gist for 53 years and have 40+ years in consulting across topic areas in water resources, petroleum, geohazards, mining, and coastal processes. Every project, person and concept that I deal with is a learning opportunity and those bits of knowledge end up in my personal toolkit. You just need to remain inquisitive.


What is the toolkit? For me it represents the


information filed away (racked and stacked) that allows me to move through my geoscience world and my personal world as a human using past knowledge to assist in new situations. These experiences can be science and technical tidbits but by-and-large these experiences relate to human communication with your science team, your client or employer and the public who may be interested in a project outcome. The com- munication component is important because it is the basis of the network you use to find new challenges and better jobs.


You will graduate and have the academic credentials to start your life in geology. These credentials provide the formal structure to talk in technical terms to other professionals in the geospeak shorthand that speeds up our communication process. You will also have the personal understanding of earth processes to allow you pick a safe place to live or at least to understand risks. However, you may need to work on your communication skills to explain issues to non-geologists because there is a lot of explaining to do. The initial launch into the working world is a process of adding toolkit elements that at first may not seem to be true geoscience, but they are ideas, factoids, and other information tidbits and skills that you pick up as you begin to work on projects. My own toolkit assembly began in earnest in 1967, when I began work in the research laboratory of the Michigan Highway Department as one of three geologists in a group 70 engineers, technicians, chemists, and physicists. I worked full time and finished a MS and PhD concurrently. I worked on aggregates and rock


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quality issues to better design concrete for roads and bridges. Michigan’s glacial gravels are very heterogeneous, and quality varied widely. I was assigned to work with technicians to go to gravel pits, mines and storage yards to evaluate rock quality and to teach the “aggregate inspectors” how to obtain repre- sentative samples from stockpiles and to identify deleterious rock types such as chert, shale, and weathered metamorphics.


My technician and field partner for this work was Tom Taylor, a man 22 years my senior, a part-time farmer and WWII army sergeant. In four years Tom and I drove about 150,000 miles all over the State of Michigan. The field work allowed us to discuss life philosophies and I got to observe how Tom approached working. Tom called “working” a process of acquiring what he called “walking around skills”. This collec- tive skill set for him included information from me, “the col- lege boy” on sampling theory for how to obtain representative samples from a quarry wall, a sand bank or a stockpile. He got all that, it was intuitive from working on the farm. But, I was also paying my college boy dues as I worked with him. I signed his timesheet. What I learned from Tom was practical stuff about living on the road and fixing equipment and dealing with people. I learned how to live on the road for extended periods, how to cook canned stew for lunch on the exhaust manifold of our truck, how to unstick a stuck truck with a winch, how to run a drilling rig and service it, how to drive a front end loader and big trucks, how to fix a balky pump or chainsaw engine, how to work in cold weather, and most important how to “talk nice” to landowners, project engineers and mine operators to gain permission to work on their property. So, what does this mean for a new graduate from college? It means that we all are launched into new situations and we begin learning new and often practical information that we will use throughout a career and lifetime.


My suggestion is: don’t be satisfied with a barista job at a Starbucks because that doesn’t fit your immediate expectations of what being a geologist should entail. Start as a drill rig helper or helper on a survey crew to get started; talk to people, develop a network of individuals and learn the walking around skills. There are several former students and mentees that have gone from rig helper to rig manager in three years with great salary and benefits. The process works, just be patient, it’s fun getting there.


Jan.Feb.Mar 2019 • TPG 49


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