UNDERGRADUATE SCHOLARSHIP WINNERS
am receiving to help in the oil industry. I want to use these leadership skills in enforcing the implementation of policies to manage natural resources in my country. It is also the hope of the country that when the oil industry flourishes, all profits gained will be invested in development. Sectors of the country with pressing needs that can be improved with these profits are the poor sanitation issues, poor condition of roads which lead to frequent vehicular accidents, poor facilities in the health sector, and many more. Little by little, we believe that we will be able to address these needs and improve the country’s standard of living. All hands are needed on deck if this goal of becoming a first world country is going to be achieved.
This is why I want to be a geologist. I believe Ghana will
be a better place someday and I want to contribute to my country’s effort of improving the lives of inhabitants, through the use of my acquired leadership skills and the practice of my profession as a petroleum geologist.
Rebecca Nesel, SA-9914 SUNY-Oswego, NE Section – Foundation AIPG funded Everyone who decides to study geology
has been led there by a different path. For me, that path was more like a windy dirt road, and not a straight paved sidewalk. Entering my freshman year of college, I
was not like a lot of my friends who knew what they were interested in. Even if I knew people that were in the ‘unde- clared’ major group like me, they were pretty certain about what their interests were and what they wanted in life. First I decided to keep that undeclared label, but the more I kept it, the more pressure I felt to find my niche. Just as a watched pot won’t boil, a freshman with no idea what she wants will not wake up one day and know she’s ready for a big declaration. I went along with my general education classes and as they dwindled down, I knew I needed to take some kind of action.
I decided to declare a major in Global and International Studies with a concentration on sustainability. Growing up in this generation, I think that a lot of people have formed a passion and interest for sustainability and the environment. Some people express this interest by studying chemistry, biol- ogy, ecology, or other sciences, but I have always just scrolled right past those options. I never believed myself to be the type of person that could succeed in science. I didn’t do well in my science classes in high school, I never enjoyed math, and I always gave myself reasons to doubt my intelligence or work ethic.
I still had a feeling that something was missing when I
chose that major, but I thought there weren’t many other pos- sibilities, as I was running out of time. A week before I was supposed to start the semester with the core classes, I was doing some browsing on the internet looking at different types of majors. I saw geology as an option and I had never really known anything about that before, nor that it was an option for me. As a child my family went on countless excursions in the woods and the mountains, where I was constantly curi- ous at the world around me. Everyone else seemed so content with accepting that all of these mountains, rivers, oceans, continents, rocks, fossils, and everything else was just there. But I never grew out of that persistent “but why?” phase. I decided to switch my major, which involved an entire week of frantic emails, dropping classes, registering for new classes, and buying new books.
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Jul.Aug.Sep 2019
At first, I was scared that I had made the wrong decision, but as soon as I started my first class, Historical Geology, I knew I was in the right place. I quickly became friends with the other people in my major who are some of my best friends today, and learned what an amazingly close department of students and professors the geology department is. I was immediately intrigued by the subjects, and although I was nervous for the math, chemistry, and physics classes I had to take, I knew it would be worth it. Not only did the classes, professors, and other students reaffirm my decision, but so did all of the opportunities. I loved that there are so many differ- ent parts of geology to study, from studying climate change by looking at ice cores in Antarctica, to looking at thin sections of igneous and metamorphic rocks in a microscope to figure out the timeline of the formation of a rock. In geology, there are always opportunities to do something new. I have learned how to make petrographic thin sections and become proficient in optical mineralogy. I have been on overnight field trips with large groups of people, become confident in a laboratory environment, performed grain size analysis, learned how to do X-Ray Diffraction, how to use a Scanning Electron Microscope, performed geophysical surveys, interpreted geophysical data, worked independently on research, written two grant propos- als, received a scholarship, and many other small victories.
The ubiquity of geology is what I love most. When someone
asks me what I can do with a geology degree, I cannot think of one thing to say because there are so many options. Studying geology has given me the confidence that if I set goals, work hard and work smart, I can do anything I want. I can continue my education by pursuing a Master’s degree or a PhD, or I can find work right after my undergraduate studies in one of the many interesting fields. There is always going to be stress, big decisions, and uncertainty, but I am looking forward to what this journey will look like in hindsight. Choosing to study geol- ogy was the best decision for me, and there is no other choice for me but to become a geologist.
Shannon Sartain, SA-9945 Dartmouth College, NE Section
When the professor of my introductory Earth Sciences class— How the Earth Works— taught us about Marie Tharp and Bruce Heezen’s map of the ocean floor, I was bewildered. Not because of how dull their title, “World Ocean Floor,” was com-
pared to that of Hess’ “Essay in Geopoetry,” and only maybe because of the vastness of the mid-oceanic ridges (I mean, look at those transform faults). I was shocked because Heezen’s name is first on the publication, when today, the map is well known to be Tharp’s creation. Marie Tharp was a legendary geologist, but her career was limited by her gender. While Heezen collected bathymetric sound data, Tharp stayed back at Columbia University because women weren’t allowed on the oceanic vessel. There, she used the data to single-handedly create the incredible map of the ocean floor, discovering the mid-Atlantic ridge, and further confirming the theory of con- tinental drift (and the mechanism behind it— sorry, Hess).
I am thankful to grow up during a time in which science is more receptive to gender inclusion. I began research through Dartmouth’s Women in Science Project (WISP), a program designed to match first-year women with research mentors. In the past year, I have examined river mixing by extracting thousands of pixels from Landsat images; processed over 100
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