Geological Society of America 2019 Annual Meeting

I attended my first professional society meeting at the 2019 GSA Annual Meeting in Phoenix, Arizona! There, I presented a poster of my preliminary results from my first Patagonia field season in the SEPM/SGD student poster competition (Dynamics of Stratigraphy and Sedimentation). Out of a few dozen participants, three of my peers and I were selected as the winning posters.

The conference also provided me the opportunity to immerse myself in the people and topics of my specific niche in the geosciences. I met with alumni from my home institution, collaborators of my mentors, and potential graduate advisers. All were able to give me great feedback on my work, answer my questions about pursuing geological sciences and graduate programs, and even brainstorm future work. I also took a short course by George Gehrels, Kurt Sundell, and Sarah George (of University of Arizona) entitled Detrital Zircon Geochronology: Best Practices for U-Pb Data Acquisition, Reduction, Analysis, and Archiving. There were so many intriguing programs, town halls, mixers, and talks going hard it was next to impossible to attend everything I wanted. Some of the highlights included: the UT-Austin alumni, faculty, and students mixer, watching my mentor, Kristina, give an awesome talk on her recent publication, exploring the city of Phoenix for the first time, and supporting the Sedimentary Geology Division as a newly selected student ambassador.

In August 2019, I started my term as the new Student Representative for the Sedimentary Geology Division of GSA. As part of my position, I assisted our officer board in getting ready for the conference by preparing materials and programs for our exhibitor booth and awards reception. I volunteered at our both where I had a lovely time handing out prizes and meeting with our community members. I’m looking forward to helping plan another year of SGD programs at the 2020 conference in Montreal!

Feel free to reach out if you’d like to see a copy of my poster or discuss my results.