GSA Monday

Hello all! Sarah here again.

This morning I went to a couple talks about volcanology, including one from Vanderbilt on field work in the Peach Spring Tuff in Arizona.

I had lunch at the Mineralogical Society of America Student Career Forum.  They had a postdoc, a tenure-track faculty, someone who was a professor and manager of a museum, a collections management specialist, a geoscience teacher who taught herself to code and manages the minerals4kids website, and someone from the Gemological Institute of America.

Afterward I went and checked out the exhibition hall, talking with several grad schools before I went to look at posters.  There I ran into Dr. Erik Klemetti (who writes the Eruptions blog on Wired and is a tenured professor at Denison University), and spoke to him briefly about his blog, volcanoes, and my current research project on the columnar rhyolite of Hughes Mountain in southeast Missouri.

I ended up going back over to the booth side to speak to a couple more graduate schools, where I discovered the University of Buffalo and had a lengthy conversation with the representatives there.  They have an extensive volcanology program, which is well-funded, and a couple of the faculty there are looking for students, so I'm definitely considering applying!

Tomorrow morning there are a couple talks I plan to go to, and then I'll be meeting with Dr. de Silva from Oregon State before browsing more posters.

I'm keeping busy, but having a blast!