Sunday, April 17, 2011

Symposiums and stuff...

So this past week was the Keck Geology Consortium Symposium in Schenectady, New York: one hundred undergraduate geology majors with posters and powerpoints to present to each other and their advisors. I was really happy to see my research group from Colorado again. It had been about 8 months since we had seen each other. The reunion was nice.

The symposium was at Union College. They planned a field trip for us on Friday. We saw some 10cm garnets, stromatolites, The Great Unconformity, and some other outcrops of rock in the southeastern Adirondacks. Upstate New York is very "cute." All the houses are cute (and huge). There was still some snow on the ground in some places - it was still quite cold there. (Really makes me glad I didn't opt to go to Vermont for grad school! I just can't handle that much snow.) On Saturday there were two 3-hour oral presentation sessions and two 1-hour poster presentation sessions. The large majority of presentations had to do with petrology and mineralogy, which are two things I know nothing about (well, not yet anyway). I feel like my presentations went well. They finished the day off with a cocktail hour and a formal dinner. It was a good experience and I feel better prepared for AGU or GSA conferences in the future.

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