At the end of each conference day, it's all come down to questions.
Today is Wednesday, and we have only a few more hours left at GSA 2016. I've gone to over thirty different talks on everything from preservation of rivers in the rock record to the role sexual versus asexual reproduction plays in survival likelihood during major extinction events. During these presentations I've been struck by a number of different emotions: excitement, boredom (I do not give a single damn about microbial mats, no matter how hard I try), confusion, and (on Monday after seemingly endless fancy statistical analyses that I couldn't make heads or tails of) utter despair that I'll ever be smart enough to make any meaningful contributions to the geologic community.
However, my main take-away from these technical sessions hasn't been discouragement but overwhelming curiosity. Almost every talk has inspired new questions. After several discussions about megafaunal extinctions at the end-Pleistocene, I want to learn more about the influence of body size on survival chances during extinction events. A geoscience education talk about using phylogenetic trees in a non-major historical geology class made me wonder what other creative tools could be used to engage non-science majors in geology classes. In a session about the conflict between the conservative religious and the scientific communities, I started thinking about how some of the approaches presented by the speakers could be incorporated into introductory geology courses.
Even though I felt as lost as an accountant in a mineralogy class in a good portion of the talks, what I did understand greatly enhanced my knowledge base and, even more importantly in my opinion, started me thinking in terms of potential research directions that I myself would like to pursue rather than simply learning from the research of others. And this, I believe, is the first step towards the next phase of my career.
-Kellum Tate
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