Question from a reader: preparing for jobs in hydrology

I've got a question from a reader, and I'm probably not the best person to answer it. She's a sophomore geology/environmental science major, and she's looking for advice about how to prepare for a career in hydrology/environmental geology.

What will exist in three years? Where are we going? How do I ensure I will be marketable as a woman in the geology field? What things should I be involved in now that will help me then?

I don't have a crystal ball (and my Gore Mountain garnet, although big enough, is blurry and hopelessly stuck in the Precambrian). And worse, I've never worked outside academia. I get some ideas about what it takes to get a job by talking to recent alums, and to people who might hire my students, and to people on the internet, and by reading the American Geological Institute's workforce data snapshots. But that's not the same as having been there myself.

So, with those caveats, let me gaze into the Magic Garnet Crystal and see what it says.

What will exist in three years?

I get the sense that hydrology jobs have remained fairly steady, compared to petroleum and* mining (which have boomed). Hydrology seems to be driven by government regulation - local, state, and federal agencies hire hydrologists for monitoring or research or to collect data that will make it possible to tell what's changed, and private environmental companies exist to help other companies comply with regulations. So I think the future of hydrology depends on who wins the next election (at all levels of government). But hydrology doesn't seem to boom or bust the way the resource industries do.

Also, hydrology/environmental geology has hired geologists in the last twenty years. Petroleum and mining companies are currently trying to hire young geologists to replace the ones who are about to retire. My generation (who got work as hydrologists) isn't retiring yet, so hydro probably won't experience the same squeeze.

So my guess is that there will be jobs, but it will take some work and searching to find them. (I don't have a good idea of exactly what those jobs are likely to involve. Anyone reading want to answer?)

What things should I be involved in now that will help me then?

Employers often contact people that they know (college professors, students who have worked for them in the past) when they've got a job opening. My department gets a lot of e-mails asking whether we've got any good students who could work during a summer, or who are ready to take a full-time job. We've started forwarding the messages to all of our students, but if a professor can think of someone immediately, that person has an advantage in applying for the job. So you want your professors to know what you're interested in, and to think of you when those questions come up. (That's potentially a women-in-science problem, if the professor remembers the male students first.) Doing a good undergraduate research project on something related to hydrology might help you stand out.

Internships can be good opportunities to explore career options. Working for a government agency (like the USGS) during college can make it easier to move into a permanent position after graduation. And internships in the private sector can help you build a resume and might lead to a full-time job, as well. (Finding interships can be difficult. Talk to your professors, and check out your college's career center. They might have good leads.)

Networking in general helps, too. The Association for Women Geoscientists can be a good group for networking - the chapters have activities in various parts of the country, and the newsletter discusses career issues a lot. (Also, environmental geologists seem to be very well-represented in AWG.) There are mentoring sessions for students at regional and national Geological Society of America meetings. Some regions of the country have regional hydrology societies, which could also be good resources.

It may also be good to prepare to become a certified professional geologist. You can also become a student member of AIPG (the American Institute of Professional Geologists). (And even if you don't, there is career information on the student section of their website.)

How do I ensure I will be marketable as a women in the geology field?

You know, I don't think women have a lot of individual control over the sexism we experience. So... be good at what you do, be assertive, network, write and revise your resume, etc., etc., etc. It's not very different from advice I give to male students. But beyond that, if you don't succeed right away, if you get asked annoying questions about your personal life, if you get harassed... don't blame yourself. And keep trying. The biggest piece of advice I could give to a woman in science is: cultivate resilience in yourself.

The second biggest piece of advice would be to find friends (or family, or a partner) who will support you in what you want to do.

That's the advice of the Magic Garnet Crystal. It's full of inclusions, though, so it's not the most trustworthy oracle around. Hopefully some other readers will comment.

* See the comment by BrianR below. Brian works in the petroleum industry, and has seen hiring slow down this year.

Resources, environment, and teaching intro geoscience in the 21st century

The Teaching Intro Geoscience workshop ended with small-group discussions about what's different about teaching intro geo courses in the 21st century. The discussion was spurred by the workshop's tag - the On the Cutting Edge series features lots of workshops on "Teaching X in the 21st Century" (where X has equaled petrology, structural geology, hydrology, sedimentary geology, geophysics, geomorphology, and intro geoscience), but we weren't talking as much about what's new as about how to teach effectively, period.

The summary of the discussion hasn't been uploaded yet, and I don't remember it well enough to summarize it. (As a friend likes to say, "I've slept since then.") But I want to talk about something that I was thinking about, but didn't say (because I was talking too much already).

The geosciences are central to understanding and dealing with big problems that humans are dealing with right now. We've said this in the past, but suddenly the geosciences are on the front page of newspapers (even when there hasn't been an earthquake, a volcanic eruption, or a flood) and are central to election issues. High prices for gasoline and natural gas, and the proposed solutions (wind, sun, nuclear, geothermal, new drilling offshore, oil shale, gas from shale, coal gasification, coal-bed methane), and the potential environmental costs of the various solutions (global warming, nuclear waste disposal, impacts from mining everything from coal to the components of solar panels, oil spills, groundwater contamination) - geoscientists contribute to understanding all of these things. For as long as I've been in geology, we've been talking about this stuff, but during the last fifteen years, few of these issues have grabbed students' attention. But the world is different - different again, for those of us shaped by the economy of the 1970's, but different for the first time for the majority of intro students.

The misconceptions we've got to deal with are overwhelming. I've recently realized that many people don't realize that methane (the greenhouse gas released by burping cows, among many other sources) is the scientific name for natural gas (the stuff that heats their home, and the fuel that T. Boone Pickens wants to use to replace gasoline in cars). And that natural gas is different from oil (and the various things that come from crude oil, such as gasoline and diesel fuel and #2 fuel oil and plastics and asphalt), but that propane can be produced from both natural gas and crude oil. And that coal gasification and coal-bed methane are different things. And that the sun's light hits Earth at different angles in the summer and winter (and that the sun is not closer in the Northern Hemisphere summer), and if you want to design effective home solar panels, you should think about that. And that the direction the wind blows depends on many things, and isn't the same all the time. And... and... and...

I don't handle resource geology very well. I'm one of those people who has taught it at the end of the semester, crammed into one discussion, and it hasn't usually gone well. (Not even when I start it by making students brainstorm a list of all the resources that they use when driving to the mountains to go skiing.) Part of the problem is my background: I grew up in the 70's as one of the "damn Yankees freez[ing] in the dark" and got into geology in the 80's because I liked water, and I became a hard-rock geologist in the early 90's, when the only resource geologists getting jobs were hydrologists. But maybe my background could also be a strength now. I've never worked for oil or mining (and was briefly an environmental geochemist), but I know plenty of people who do. (That's one side effect of being the past president of an AAPG-affiliated society.) I've taken oil money (Arco funded my graduate advisor, and Chevron, Shell, and Mobil had all endowed funds that supported graduate students), but am familiar with the overwhelming evidence for human-caused climate change. (I read the literature, I've been a member of AGU, I know climate researchers and trust their competence as scientists.) I don't think that demonizing either environmentalists or oil/gas/mining companies gets us anywhere close to solving the tough problems we've got to deal with.

So I'm thinking about what to do. I'm teaching Earth Systems Science, which gives me both opportunities and constraints. I can't simply structure an entire intro course around resource problems (though that could make a good topical intro course), but I can fit resources into the theme of big geochemical cycles. (Too bad I don't really structure my course using an earth systems approach - my one attempt left students saying "Earth is a complex system and we can't understand it," which was not the response I had hoped for.) Maybe I can use resource issues as case studies for discussions of all sorts. Maybe I should find a way to talk about organic stuff (like petroleum and coal) in my minerals section - they aren't minerals (because they're organic), but they are important chemical components of rocks. I could talk about what makes oil, coal, and natural gas in my discussion of sedimentary rocks. I could figure out some way to talk about fracture mechanics (and why cracks are important for both water and natural gas, and why they are potentially dangerous in places like the Crandall Canyon mine collapse) when I'm talking about earthquakes and structural geology. I already talk about climate change, but I could work in some kind of final brainstorming session that ties everything together. (Was that vague? I swear, before I do anything in class my instructions will be more specific.)

What would you do? What misconceptions have you encountered about resources? How would you deal with them - especially when it comes to misconceptions that are entrenched in political beliefs, from the Right or the Left?

A more serious Earth Day post

The price of oil is over $100 a barrel. Copper is worth so much that wiring gets stolen from building sites. In my part of the world, water would be scarce due to population growth, even without the added problems of climate change. After years of being those oddball geeks from books by John McPhee, geologists are in demand again. So why am I finding it so hard to figure out how to pitch the science to people?

Geology is, after all, everywhere around us. It’s under our feet – perhaps below a few layers of pavement, but it’s still down there. It’s the river that’s running high on the other side of the levee, or another river, on the other side of the country, that doesn’t have enough water for all the people who want to use it. It’s the beach we play at. It’s the mountain we ski on. It’s the rocks that fell on the highway when the roadcut got wet. It’s the sudden lurch of an earthquake beneath our feet, even in the supposedly stable mid-continent. And yet so many people go about their lives blissfully ignorant of the physical world around them.

Part way through college, I came to a horrible discovery. We already knew how to avoid fracking up the environment. Want to avoid contaminating groundwater? Make less toxic waste, and don’t just dump it. Use too much energy*? Turn off the lights, walk or bike or carpool, turn down the heat or the air conditioning. And as for living in harmony with the environment – avoiding the need for flood control, avoiding getting buried by a landslide – well, it isn’t that difficult. The land beside rivers is prone to flooding. Steep slopes have landslides. The problem wasn’t that scientists didn’t understand. The problem was that people weren’t aware, or didn’t care.

I bailed on environmental geology as a career, figuring that education was more important. I still think so, but I don’t have much hope for its effectiveness, either.

As far as I can tell, American society has come nowhere in the past twenty years. Well, ok, maybe not nowhere. Compact fluorescent lightbulbs have improved, computers go to sleep automatically, refrigerators and washing machines are more efficient, and the Prius has finally been invented. But that isn’t a heck of a lot to show for twenty years.

And I’m not sure that geoscience education has much to contribute today, either. We can tell students about the research behind An Inconvenient Truth and argue with young skeptics. We can talk about the resources that go into driving to the ski area, riding the lift, and proposing to someone on the slopes. But do the students hear? And does the connection of geology with the resource industry mean that we become the Bad Guys who are profiting from the destruction of the planet? How can we explain that the oil industry exists for them, for them and the other billions of people driving cars; that coal is burned because they use electricity; that metals are mined to build their mountain bikes?

We weren’t very effective in the 90’s, when we weren’t in demand. How can we be effective now, when we’re seen as part of the problem?

*We didn’t talk much about carbon dioxide in the 80’s, unless we were climate scientists, so the issue was wasting energy rather than generating CO2.