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In general, there's an axion
where the more rocks a geologist sees the better that geologist is going to become.
And so part of our goal in the geology department
is to give the geology students as much exposure to the rocks
around the world. I'm still kind of on the fence about it honestly. Even though it was something
I was looking forward to.
But then I heard that there is going to be a geology course
and then all of a sudden, all my geography friends were signing up for it too. So I thought
"Well you know this is going to be the one chance that I'm gonna be able to go
travel all these places with a bunch of people I know."
So go for it. Eventually as I learned more about the trip and more about what we were seeing
I grow to become more interested in the cultures themselves, and so it was like
geology got me hooked and then the rest
came with it. It was such a great experience and I don't regret anything.
it was one of the trips I wanted to go since my freshman year. I heard about it
from actually a fellow
geology student. He said "You gotta go on this trip" and I said
"Yeah, I'll look into it." I looked into it
and I thought "Yeah let's do it." All my friends started going and I was like
"You know what?
This a once in a lifetime opportunity. I might as well go for it."
And it turned out to be a fantastic experience. It is extremely unique
geology that's really textbook stuff that we don't really
have especially in this region and in
the United States as a whole too. This was a particularly interesting experience
where we actually got to go far afield
to Asia and so we saw fantastic rocks in Japan,
Taiwan, and China. We saw, we climbed
Mount Fuji, Mount Aso, and we saw some beautiful
erosional features, limestone erosional features in
Guilin and Kunming in China.
And so, it was just spectacular
experience, some of the best geology in the world. Seismology
is my focus within geology, so going to a place where
active faults and earthquakes happen all the time
was really exciting for me. Japan was a good place to see
what kind of education is getting out there
in terms like earthquake prevention and earthquake preparedness and things like that.
So on the geology side, that was what I was excited about.
Personally, after school I want to see what the park service has
in terms of jobs. And I think seeing how
park services were run in another country was really interesting because
they have lots of paid services, they're really thinking
about the tourists in that regard,
and they make it really easy for them to get around. I now know that there's some of these
amazing places that I never, in a million years, thought to go explore,
to experience, and now I would love to go do research in China or Japan.
For graduate school and that's pretty awesome. I know there's
a future there with the resources.
The infrastructures aren't quite there yet, and maybe someday I'll be able to go and
change that and help out the world somehow.
It's like a kid in a candy store. It's just
for me it was exciting to be there, and it was actually more exciting to share it
with people who appreciate
what they're seeing. And our students definitely took full advantage of
of the experiences.