Spring 2011 Semester: How my Junior year got me 3/4 of the way through undergrad

Junior year is commonly expressed as the most difficult portion of college.  The classes are no longer remedial, your teachers have often taught you before and know how to demand the most out of you, and it seems every instructor believes their course is the most important class you are taking at the time.

I cruised through most of my spring semester relatively easily.  My course load was initially light because our Field Class did not start in earnest until a month in.  With the inclusion of the field class I managed to adjust and keep a steady pace through the majority of the semester which appeared to pass more quickly than most.  It wasn't until the last three weeks of the semester that I began to feel the pressures of deadlines and faced the shocking realization that although I had worked steadily and reliably on all of my projects, there was no way I could finish strongly on all of them.  I wrote six papers or reports during the last two weeks of the semester, and was remarkably burnt out as I faced the coming three weeks of Field Camp a week after finals.  Looking back at the semester, I'm still perplexed how I became so busy during the last month of school but I only had one paper I feel was inferior work and I'm proud to have made it through this semester more than any other.

Tectonic Evolution of North America

This course is intended to be a capstone of sorts, integrating every course before it into a means of understanding how western North America came to be, from the accretion of terranes onto the craton all the way to the most modern expression of faulting in the Basin and Range province and Rio Grande Rift.

My main takeaways from this course were how to construct a rough paleogeographic map based on sedimentary rock paleocurrents, rock types, and contributing clast characteristics.  I also learned a great deal about applying modern analogs of geological features to hypothesized features of the Western US and surprisingly on the ignimbrite flareup and caldera characteristics (We were supposed to learn about them in depth from a field trip to Valles Caldera in Ig. & Met. Petrology but rough weather canceled that).  Overall, this was a low key class that really rounded out my geologic knowledge.

Inside of a flow banded rhyolite dome from the ignimbrite flareup in southern New Mexico.  Notice how the rock is oriented towards the supposed vent of the dome.

Petroleum Geology

This was a class I was reluctant to take, because I have always tried to distance myself from a fate in the oil industry.  I just feel like the culture and tendencies of the industry really wouldn't suit me, and this class certainly solidified that view for me.  I learned a great deal about petroleum starting from humble kerogens and given the suitable conditions (source, maturation, migration, reservoir, seal, and trap) its inevitable transformation into oil, gas, and other substances of interest to society.  I learned a great deal about how structure can trap fluids, and how stratigraphy can do the same, especially given the complexities of sequence stratigraphy (which was my weak point in this course as well).  Most importantly though, as we took a field trip to a near production well in Artesia, NM I realized the gulf between engineers and scientists in the petroleum industry was too vast and full of animosity to shake me of my convictions regarding the industry.  Additionally, this was the course I most neglected because our tests were so easy and when all of my papers came due at once, my basin analysis paper was my weakest offering of the semester.

Global Geochemical Systems

This was the most interesting course I took this past semester, the geochemical counterpoint to the great field and structural lessons I learned from Tectonics of North America and my Field Class.  It is meant to be a graduate level course, but with my background in geochemistry I managed to get in relatively easily.  This class gave me a much greater appreciation for the different types of reservoirs of the mantle, of each contributing component to an arc system (both continental and oceanic), and since so much of the class focused on modeling of igneous bodies I really grew to appreciate how much the degree of partial melting can influence the characteristics of a melt and the rock that forms from that melt.  I had never written so many papers or done so much modeling for a class before, so it was a challenge to complete all of the work and I certainly managed to improve my ability to read geologic publications in the process.

Statistics for Engineers and Scientists

This was another of those classes that I went into with a set of expectations that were almost immediately shown to be hugely unfounded.  I believed the class would focus on statistical analysis of populations and the errors of those analyses, but the course was much more focused on probabilities of outcomes and similarities of populations.  Additionally, there was a focus on the distributions of populations that I felt had less impact on any geological work than I would have liked.  There was also a strong emphasis on proofs in the class which further added to my sense of the abstract to the course.  I felt the course was geared much more towards the engineering and business students than for a student with a scientific background.  I learned a lot in the class, but time will tell what will be useful as a geologist and in everyday experience.

Intro to Fluid Mechanics

This was the surprise pleasure of my semester.  My roommate in civil engineering warned me of his struggle in this course and so I went in prepared for the worst and that may have made all the difference.  I really enjoyed the balance of physics problems for assignments and the engineering/laboratory experience I gained from lab and lectures.  I learned a great deal about how civil engineering supports modern society and about the basic properties of fluids in various systems.

  

My main takeaway from this course was how prevalent the measurement of energy is for any physical system (especially using Bernoulli's Equation).  I also had to construct a working fountain in a group of four students, and I learned just how complex even a "simple" engineering project can be.  It was very time intensive and the engineers had a much more stringent system of reporting their work than I had ever encountered.  It was a great learning experience to see how the other half (the engineering students) live and work while studying among them.

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Overall, this was a very demanding semester and I feel like it took a lot out of me.  I hadn't had a collection of courses with such disparate topics and approaches to those topics since high school.  It was hard to adjust from class to class, and the pre-sunrise wake up during the start of the semester in the cold, winter months was particularly difficult to maintain.  I have never taken so many naps in my life than I did for those five months.  I made it through this challenging semester, but I proved to myself just how much work I could take on and still succeed.