Aerial view of a landscape with rolling hills, a valley, and a river. On top of the photo text reads: "Geo Careers. Mary-Anne Hildebrandt." with the icon of a pickaxe hitting a rock.

Geo Careers: Mary-Anne Hildebrandt

What is a career? Merriam-Webster defines career as “a profession for which one trains, and which is undertaken as a permanent calling.” With more workplaces embracing the idea of flexibility, the weight of words like “permanent” and “calling” evoke something else entirely. Career originates from the Latin carrus, as in a wheeled cart, which some interpret to mean chariot (Online Etymology Dictionary, n.d.). It sounds a great deal more epic than logging into a laptop for another Zoom call. Imagine you and your coworkers embarking on a journey in chariots each day. Surely, with that as your vision, nothing is out of reach. So, what do you do for a living? It’s a common question for any social gathering, and yet, my answer is met with surprise. People are surprised to learn that I am not a teacher or nurse or some other career that matches their perception of who I am. No one has ever guessed that I am a geoscientist. Why? Do I not look or sound like a geologist? This encounter is not exclusive to the public. In truth, I’ve even been mistaken for an administrative assistant when standing in my office wearing head to toe safety gear surrounded by rock samples, and that’s not to say administration staff don’t do field work. They most certainly can and do! It’s that everyone carries bias, and when no other information is available, we fill in the missing data with assumptions based on our own perceptions of the world. Even recently at PDAC, I was asked if I was there as a member of the media, and not a geologist. Who knew that you could work in an industry for 17 years and still feel at times that you don’t quite fit other people’s perceptions of your job title. Every day there are lessons, and some are only learned much later.  When I left university for my first summer field position in 2006, I intended to return for a Master of Science, but looming student debt and other family obligations drove me to stay in the industry. I dreamed about continuing to hone my skills in the areas of geoscience that I enjoyed. Early on, I had a conversation with a manager of a team I wanted to join about my career aspirations, and he tried to put an end to those dreams. He explained that no company would invest their finite resources to support my development in this field because I was a woman, and at the age of 25, I was too old. In his experience, it wouldn’t be long before I would marry, have children, and pursue a different career. I left that conversation feeling devastated because this manager was someone that I truly respected. At the time, I didn’t know how to challenge the underlying beliefs and assumptions that he had conveyed about me. I questioned whether saying anything at all would make a difference. Who was he to decide what my future would hold? That evening, I resolved to not let his ignorance define me.   Did you stay in Geoscience? I have had the good fortune to have worked in the field of geoscience since graduating and successfully achieved my designation as a Professional Geoscientist (P.Geo.) in 2017. Drilling, sampling, mapping, and modelling led me to a deeper understanding of the influence of geological processes, sample bias, and error within spatial models and mineral estimates. In addition, the depth and breadth of the technical projects I have been able to work on has increased not only my technical skills but also my leadership skills. After working for several years as the person performing the annual reconciliation for Mineral Resources and co-authoring the technical report on the resource, I was appointed to carry out the duties of Competent Person (as defined in the SAMREC and the JORC codes) for the deposit I had spent years mapping and modelling. A Competent Person is responsible for preparing the technical report used for public disclosure of a Mineral Resource and Reserve. In the Canadian context, a CP would be similar to a Qualified Person or QP under the National Instrument 43-101 Standard. CPs, like QPs, are considered to be competent to sign-off because they meet or exceed the knowledge requirements and have enough time working in a particular commodity, like gold. There are other requirements, and for those working in the industry, it is best to be well-versed in the governing code or standard for your jurisdiction. It’s an incredibly important responsibility that cannot be taken lightly, and I was honoured to know that those in power trusted my capabilities to appoint me into that role. Although I enjoy the technical aspects of my work, I have found mentoring and coaching others to be equally, if not more, rewarding. My career has carried me to remote areas across Canada and even overseas to Botswana and South Africa. I am forever grateful to have been mentored and supervised by professionals who are highly respected in their field. These are the people who saw the value I could add to a team and a project, and they were instrumental in why I stayed the course. I found professionals from all disciplines were always there to lend a hand or an ear to help find a solution to the latest problem.  One project that I had been assigned was to create a spatial estimate for a stockpile. This was not the norm and fell outside of our regular workflow. A stockpile is not an in-situ deposit. To use it in a business plan, my work still needed to answer similar questions that would be asked during mineral classification of an in-situ deposit. There are a number of factors involved in this work, but to keep this brief, these are the types of questions that needed to be considered: How did the mining team place the rock? Do we have confidence in the volume of the stockpile? How was the volume measured? At what frequency was the volume measured? Do

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Grey and red stones. Text overlay reads "Geo Careers. Sisyphus Mountain, A career reflection by Melanie Siewert, President of PGO"

Sisyphus Mountain: A Career Reflection by Melanie Siewert, President of PGO

In ancient Greek mythology, Sisyphus is known as the guy destined to push a rock up a mountain for all of eternity, with the rock rolling back to the bottom of the hill each time. For those that do not know the rest of the story, King Sisyphus was a mortal man, known for his arrogance. He made demands of the gods, claiming that his feats as a mortal made him worthy of becoming a god. He claimed he deserved, even demanded, that the gods grant him immortality. The Greek gods were ever obliging but in their twisted way, their gifts were rarely without a price. It is thought that the gods responded to King Sisyphus’ arrogance by rewarding him with a lesson in humility. This story of incessant effort with no reward is often used as a metaphor for our daily slog –  wake up, go to work, put in your hours, come home, go to sleep and do it all over again tomorrow. If this is what you are doing, you are not living a fulfilling career. You are merely collecting a pay cheque. It shouldn’t be that way! After over twenty years practicing as a geoscientist, I often get questions about what I like about my profession and what keeps me engaged. Indefinitely, my answer revolves around lifelong learning. I’ve seen a lot of change in the industry over my time. When I started in the industry, I thought it was about soil, rocks, water and their interactions with contaminants. Since that time, I’ve learned that a career in environmental consulting is about much more than the physical matrices we assess. I’ve learned about various site characterization and remediation technologies, human health and ecological risk assessment, ecological considerations, environmental liability and legal considerations. I’ve seen regulation changes that made previously ‘clean’ sites contaminated once more. I’ve even seen the evolution of methods to deal with contaminants of concern that had not even been identified when I first started practicing. Over the years, I’ve learned invaluable lessons about health and safety, professional ethics, client satisfaction and staff motivation. Some lessons were not necessarily by choice, like experiencing the look of disdain on the face of a driller’s helper that I sent home because he showed up at the drill site in running shoes or experiencing the gut-wrenching feeling of shutting down a job site after hitting a buried line after the public utility locator rushed and missed a traffic line. Other lessons are earned, like the understanding of how different contaminant plumes migrate and the telling evidence to suggest a commingled plume. And some lessons come from investing 10,000 hours in listening to client needs and learning how to tailor the products we provide to satisfy project specific objectives.  One of the most fulfilling aspects of my profession is passing those lessons on to the next generation of professionals: explaining the importance of listening to clients and hearing what drives their decisions. Is it fear of a health and safety incident or fear of a financial audit? Or is their priority protecting site aesthetics like a showcased tulip garden at a public park or avoiding disruptions to site operations like a profitable coffee drive through at a gas station. Or teaching reporting staff that how we present results can be as important as the actual results. I had a tough lesson very early in my career that always stuck with me. A reporter from a small town newspaper took a sentence from my publicly accessible environmental report and presented it out of context. It left me keenly aware of the importance of making every sentence count. I am immensely proud to know that young professionals that I have mentored over my career are now found throughout our industry in regulatory positions.  In my career, I’ve been blessed with daily challenges and opportunities for problem solving. I once visited a job site to perform a safety observation on field staff. Instead, we spent most of our time troubleshooting our drilling location as site logistics wouldn’t allow us to place the borehole where we needed to characterize soil contamination. Sitting in the van after finding a workable solution, he asked me “Have you ever had a job run exactly as planned?” I searched my memory bank and came up with nothing. Consulting is an industry of thinking on our feet and managing change. That same individual from the van left me thoroughly impressed when he applied his determination to a monitoring site where we had “lost” a well for several monitoring events. Other monitoring teams had been to the site and reported back that they couldn’t find the well based on the measurements provided. I remember the look on that determined individual’s face when he said “I saw that well before. I know I can find it.”  And he did! It had incorrectly been recorded relative to two adjacent survey pins; when he shifted his search to the next set of pins, the well was at the exact measurements provided on the figure. I find I have met the most interesting people over the years because consulting attracts people that thrive in an environment of discovery and change. For my part, I have never shied away from accepting those opportunities.  I’ve learned that geoscience is more than geology. You need to be part historian and part detective to piece together a complete conceptual site model. You need to be part interpreter and part politician to bring the right group of technical experts to the table to collaborate on multidisciplinary projects. Any environmental consultant will tell you that there is never a dull moment. We are masters in logistics and contingency planning. If your day to day feels like you are merely punching a time clock, perhaps you are not listening to what the universe is offering.  So back to the guy with the rock. There is an alternate theory to explain the lesson the Greek gods had for King Sissyphus. In

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Photo of two people climbing a mountain range. On top of the photo text reads: "Geo Careers: Kassandra Del Greco."

GeoCareers: Kassandra Del Greco

When asked if I could write a little something about my career in geoscience, my gut response was, “I’m not sure I’m qualified to write something.” However, with a little reflection and persuasion, I thought it might be beneficial for others to read about how far an education in geosciences might actually take you. My initial interest in geology came out of my decision to take a “bird” course in CEGEP (Collège d’Enseignement General Et Professionnel), a type of junior college that encompasses the equivalent of grade 12 and the first year of university, to alleviate the heavy math and physics schedule I had lined up for one term. I signed up with a friend, thinking “Won’t it be nice to take a really easy class this semester” and soon found myself completely enthralled with learning about Earth’s history and systems. When university applications came around later that year, I began to consider that the career as a mathematician I had envisioned for myself didn’t quite make sense and I soon found myself wandering over to the geology, mining engineering, and geophysics booths at the McGill University open house. I was reminded during my visit to McGill that I knew two women who had graduated from McGill’s geology program. Two young women from my community, who I knew from extracurricular activities, had graduated with McGill geology degrees a few years prior and from what I could see on Facebook, were living adventure-filled lives working as exploration geologists in places like Australia and Africa. Growing up I had limited travel opportunities; it suddenly occurred to me that there are literally rocks all over the planet and that in theory, I could work anywhere in the world as a geologist, and with a career as a geologist, I might have the opportunity to visit places I’d never dreamed of before. What really sealed the deal was when I heard about the famous “Willy Trips” at McGill’s geology department, where Dr. Anthony Williams-Jones travelled to different destinations with a class of students every year to explore and learn about the geology of a new country. I was hooked. I went through university taking every opportunity to attend as many field trips as I could, and visited places like Chile, Tanzania, Columbia and the Southwest United States during my studies alone. I was so excited to begin my career as an exploration geologist and visit places like the remote Canadian North, Australia, Africa, South America…you name it. Everything was on track until 2012, the year I finally graduated. I entered the job market, top of my class, ready to begin working as an exploration geologist in mid-2012. Little did I know that 2012 would mark the beginning of one of the longest commodity and mining market downturns in history. It was difficult to find a job as an experienced geologist, let alone a freshly graduated geologist with just a summer’s worth of experience. I hustled as much as anyone, applying to literally any job I could find in the industry, but like many of the peers I graduated with, had no luck. It was disheartening, to say the least. After about 8 months of unemployment, I began looking at graduate studies opportunities. I thought that maybe I could either pursue a career in academia, or at the very least, hide out during a Masters degree and hope that within a couple of years the industry would turn and entry level jobs would begin to reappear. During my Masters degree at the University of Victoria I studied the structural geology and tectonics of the Cantabrian mountains in Northern Spain and was fortunate enough to spend a summer in Spain doing field work and attending conferences with geologists from the University of Salamanca. I finished my M.Sc. in mid-2016 and two hours after submitting my final thesis I was called by my first ever boss in the Quebec mining industry who I worked for a summer prospecting. He asked me if I was looking for work (I was) and told me about an opportunity for field work that summer (Holy cr*p, my plan worked!). I had my boots on the ground in Northern Quebec about two weeks later and was thrilled to, four years later, be starting my career as an exploration geologist. It was about 18 months of bliss, working multiple consecutive contracts in exploration for multiple gold exploration companies in Quebec. I was working on rotations that were 21 days on, 10 days off, or 14 days on, 14 days off. Of course, I took every opportunity to travel on my time off, living out of a duffle bag for months on end, visiting places like Portugal, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Italy. Essentially, I would go anywhere I could get to for a reasonable price and with less than 7 hours of flight time. However, it was about two years later when I started to feel the pains of the job. It turned out that as much as I loved learning about geology in school, I didn’t exactly love the work. I wasn’t totally enthused by core logging, learning to create geological models, or even spending time in the field. I was beginning to feel worn down by the swamps, the bugs, the heavy bags full of rocks, and spending whole days in the bush soaking wet. On top of this, I started to become acutely aware of the fact that I had no community. Over nearly two years, I had barely spent any time at home, causing me to feel disconnected from friends, unable to get involved in any type of club or activities at home, and forget dating, it was impossible! I began to reflect on whether this was the career for me. Sure, I loved learning about geology, and I loved travelling, but I didn’t really enjoy the work or the life I had built for myself anymore. I began searching for a mentor (I found a great one). I started writing

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Underground photo of a mine site. Tools and various machines sit in front of a wall covered in wire. Text on top of the photo says: Geo Careers Melissa Ng.

Geo Careers: Melissa Ng

One question that I often am asked is, “How did you pick mining as an industry?” That answer is simple: De Beers commissioned a raw diamond exhibit at the University of Alberta where I attended school. This was my first introduction to mining and the idea and complexity around mining, which I found fascinating and challenging. The second question I always get asked is: “How did you get to where you are now?” That answer is a little more complex. We all take different journeys in life and career. Some experiences are within our control, and some are not. People always joke: “If I knew what I knew now, things would be different.” But there is no journey, no growth, and no success without those experiences. They are unique to us and mold us in the unique individual we are. So, to me, the real question should be “How has your experience specific to your career helped you to get to where you are now?” I began my first job search after graduation with enthusiasm, looking for the job opportunity that would launch my career. At the time, the market was hot with international opportunities, as well as Canadian prospects, which meant that I could be picky about the opportunities I pursued. I knew from my summer jobs doing exploration work in the Northwest Territories that I wanted a fly-in fly-out position at an operation and not field exploration work. My husband and I were married in 2007, right after my graduation, so choosing a fly-in fly-out role was a lifestyle choice we were making so that we could stay in Edmonton. My parents were born and raised in Saskatoon, SK so I knew about Cameco Corporation, the uranium producer centered in Saskatchewan. I was excited to have an interview with them. Even during the interview, being able to talk about structurally driven deposits was thrilling. I felt good after the interview, and therefore, was disappointed when I later received a call that hiring had been frozen due to unknown circumstances. Lucky for Cameco, I was so picky during my job search that I had only applied to one other company at the time. In January 2008, I received a call asking if I was still interested and if I could start next week. I didn’t even own a pair of steel toe boots yet, so I couldn’t start the following week, but I was thrilled that I did not have to endure a second round of interviews. The first time I flew into Rabbit Lake operation, which is situated at the edge of the Athabasca Basin in Northern Saskatchewan, I felt what I would describe as contained excitement. Contained because I didn’t want to make it obvious how “green” I really was. In other words, I did not want to stand out or get noticed. Which is very hard to do when you are a woman in a male-dominated industry, and in particular, a young woman in a male-dominated industry. I stuck out like a sore thumb, despite my cargo pants and winter coat. I was fresh meat, and everyone wanted to get to know the new girl. Throughout my career, I have heard stories of women who feel like they made the wrong career choice and have left the industry. When I hear this, I reflect back to those first few days at Cameco. My first room at camp was not my permanent room and there was a nasty draft from the window blowing over my head. I remember wearing my toque and not being able to fall asleep, wondering what I had gotten myself into. After a few days, I moved rooms and, luckily, there was no draft in the second room. I remember sitting around the lunch table with the geologists and engineers and hearing the story about why my hiring was delayed. There was an open historical drilled lake hole that intersected a stope (a stope is a term in mining for dugout space that contains your ore that is to be mined). It was marked as cemented, but after the blast, water started pouring into the mine – a sign you never want to see underground. But the tale was dramatic and heroic, and through teamwork the workers were able to control the situation and mitigate the water. The epic conclusion of the story involved a geologist shoving a piece of PVC pipe into the hole on the shallow lake bottom. I know we all exaggerate our stories, but at that point, I knew this was my crew and this was where I belonged. This was 2008 and when the financial crisis hit hard I was fortunate to be at Cameco. Many of my colleagues from school found themselves without work whereas Cameco sold its product with contracts with locked-in pricing, which meant that Cameco was stable. And so was my career. That geologist who starred in the epic conclusion of the story with the PVC pipe was Dennis Merber, who was also my first mentor in the industry. Once he became the Chief Geologist at Cameco, I learned a lot from him. He gave us the flexibility to make the position our own. He recognized that you need to incorporate fun at work if you want to improve efficiency. He also encouraged sharing of job tasks, which is the primary reason why I was not just exclusively logging core at the start my career. His job as a leader was to take care of the wellbeing of his people and sometimes that was as simple as a break with a little bit of fun. His leadership tactic stayed with me my entire career and I have used it many times, even sometimes when I had to defend my decision to add fun to the work cycle. I stayed with Cameco for 8 years because of the people. I built many great relationships over that time, relationships that I keep to this day.

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Kristin standing in a field with technical equipment. Text reads: "Geo Careers. Kristin Hanson."

Geo Careers: Kristin Hanson

After 30+ years of work in the consulting industry, I look back at lessons I wish I had learned and advice that I wish I had received earlier in my career.  In sharing these personal lessons learned, I hope to help you with your career. I finished my career in the position of Senior Vice President of Infrastructure Engineering for SNC-Lavalin, one of Canada’s largest engineering companies. I managed a team of engineers and scientists in Ontario who were designing major infrastructure (highways, transit lines, bridges, and buildings), providing geotechnical and environmental support services to infrastructure construction, and investigating and cleaning up contaminated sites. A female geoscientist managing a large infrastructure engineering group. This was a first! But let’s go back to when the story began…. I started my career in the Washington D.C. area working to clean up groundwater at former military bases.  Explosives and chemical warfare agents sound like something from an action movie. But early in my career, they were a daily concern. As I stood in my full PPE in the middle of a field riddled with ticks and unexploded ordnance, I wondered what in the world I was doing! I bonded with my co-workers while we helped each other in and out of our PPE, and even had to practice giving each other injections of an antidote in case of chemical warfare agent exposure. We bonded over this crazy work and relied on one another to accomplish our tasks safely. When I graduated with my B.Sc. in Environmental Geology, I thought I knew everything. I studied geology because I liked science and didn’t really want to work with people. I used to say I don’t like people; I just like rocks – they don’t talk back! My early experiences in the field taught me how little I really knew, and that people could teach me things, if I listened. My work on the military bases projects got me new assignments working on other projects in the western US, France, and Puerto Rico. I would travel from one site to another, often without any breaks in between because managers all wanted me on their projects. I had turned into a pretty good field team leader, and they knew they could count on me to get the scope of work done right. I was managing field teams and drilling crews, often the only female at the site. I felt like I had to be tough and work hard to prove myself. I had no social life, I missed weddings and funerals, but I was busy with work. I thought that my dedication would be recognized and rewarded. Instead, I got exhausted and burned out. I eventually left my job to go to graduate school. I thought having my M.Sc. would help me get what I wanted: a career that I enjoyed as well as a life. PIECE OF ADVICE #1:  Don’t sit back and wait for rewards to come to you. Good work is rewarded with more work. Speak up and ask for what you want! While I was working on my master’s degree, my advisor told me that I should have a “career plan.”  I had no idea what that was at the time, but I thought about it a lot.  I asked my fellow grad students if they had a career plan.  I got some interesting perspectives from them and started talking to more people to see what I could learn from them.  This was a turning point for me.  I realized that my “drive for excellence” mindset that made project managers love me was probably considered aggressive and off-putting to a lot of people. I learned empathy and to listen to learn and understand. PIECE OF ADVICE #2:  Listen, don’t assume. Focus on learning everything you can from those around you. Everyone has something interesting to teach you if you set aside your ego and listen. M.Sc. in hand, I moved to Ontario and worked in the environmental consulting business as a hydrogeologist.  I came to realize that armed with the skills of empathy and listening, I did like working with people after all, and I made a pretty good project manager. In fact, I had leadership skills. I was an excellent “second banana.” I took pride in how much my bosses relied on me to get things done behind the scenes. One day my boss approached me and one of my colleagues in the hall. He said, “I’m planning a reorganization and I need to promote someone to Vice President and it will be one of you two, who wants it?” To this day I don’t really know why I had such a sudden reaction, but I immediately took a step back and pointed at my colleague. I didn’t say a word, just pointed at him. A month later he was my boss. PIECE OF ADVICE #3:  Your career starts out like a leaf in a stream, you float along learning the ropes but if you don’t take charge, you will just end up where you drift. Don’t be passive, make some goals and a plan to achieve them, with these you have a way to navigate the stream to get to where you want to go. When you engage with a mentor, you are adding a motor to get where you want to go faster. After I realized my mistake, I started engaging people as mentors, and trying to demonstrate that I was a senior manager. I had the skills, why didn’t I demonstrate them more openly? I started speaking out – a lot. I came up with ideas and strategies to improve the business. After a few years, there was another re-org, and I got that VP job. I loved it! I had really hit my stride. But it had taken me too long to get here. PIECE OF ADVICE #4:  Go for it! You don’t have to have 90% of the qualifications of a job to apply; if you meet 50% go for it! You can demonstrate that you can quickly learn the rest. If it doesn’t work out this time, you

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Confessions of a Geoscience Educator – How Did I Get Here?

It is common to hear stories of highly gifted individuals pursuing a career path and ultimately landing their dream job after years of climbing the ladder. Sometimes I even tell people that I am very lucky to have landed my dream job. “Lucky” is certainly true, but the fact is, I’m not particularly gifted, nor did I imagine working in the career I have now, that is, being an educator. That sort of happened by accident. My job is amazing, but my work does not quite match what I originally envisioned. Yes, I have always wanted to be a paleontologist, and yes, people call me a paleontologist, but my main passion is teaching geology (and not much of it is actually paleontology). When people asked me what I did for a living, I used to reply that I was a paleontologist. Now, I’m more inclined to say that I’m a university teacher. I guess I am getting to that age where I wake up and think, “Well, how did I get here?”” (and now I’m cursing David Byrne because I know I’ll have that certain song in my head for the rest of the day). I am slightly bothered by the fact that I was born in 1966. This means I’m about as old as the theory of plate tectonics. I have only recently come to fully embrace this without the eye twitch! Plot it on the geologic time scale and it doesn’t look quite so bad. But I digress… I was born in the town of Olds, Alberta. My earliest memory of a rock that interested me was a piece of shale that a friend of the family showed me. It had a trilobite in it. Apparently, I had already shown an interest in rocks at this point, and she thought I might be interested in looking at it. I remember seeing it and thinking that it was the coolest thing I had ever seen. It looked kind of creepy, but beautiful at the same time. And a dead animal in a rock? Sign me up! I’ve noticed that a disproportionate number of photos I have of me as a kid show me looking at the ground for fossils (or rocks). I don’t know exactly what drew me to fossils and rocks. Maybe it has something to do with always having been vertically challenged (and being so close to the ground)? Or maybe it’s an obsession with dead things? I still don’t know exactly what it was… This obsession with fossils got me in trouble at times. I remember my mom being very upset with me for being nearly hit by a train while looking at the stones in the ballast of the train tracks. I was nearly hit by a car once when I was inspecting gravel on the side of the road too. I was developing an interest in dinosaurs as my parents would take me to Drumheller (about an hour and a half drive from Olds) to look for dinosaur fossils (the Royal Tyrrell Museum wasn’t yet constructed). Then my dad (a professor in horticulture) got a job at the University of Guelph. In Ontario. Well, dang – there goes dinosaur hunting.  Fortunately, I found out that there were a lot of old invertebrate fossils to be found in Ontario. I started finding fossils in…driveway gravel (of course). I was very, very fortunate to have parents who were supportive of my strange interests.   My fossil obsession continued through my teen years. I kept it hidden from most others, as I thought most people would think it was a really weird thing (but who are we kidding? Teens think everything is weird). One thing I did discover during high school is I always learned more about something if I had to explain it to someone else. This still holds true for me today. There are a whole lot of things I wouldn’t know now if I didn’t have to teach about them in my courses. The fantasy of becoming a paleontologist sat in the back of my mind for years. But I had always assumed that I would have to be an exceptional student to get into that sort of field. The thing was, I was not an exceptional student. Especially in science. And I was hopeless at math (and I’m still hopeless at math). My teachers in high school (and my guidance counsellor) told me that if I was to go to university after high school, my best bet would be visual art, music or maybe English. I don’t think any of them expected me to go into science. My grades, although definitely not stellar, were good enough to get me into the University of Western Ontario for science, and ultimately into the geology program. By the second year of my undergraduate program, I found my people. I became friends with other students interested in geology and was delighted to learn that a lot of my peers really sucked at math too. One of the most transformative realizations I came to appreciate from the courses I took was that paleontology was part of something much bigger than I formerly realized. Taking courses in a variety of subdisciplines – sedimentology, geochemistry, structural geology, petrology, and many others – made me appreciate the complexity and interconnectedness of natural processes in the Earth system as a whole. The idea that (in conjunction with characteristics of the rocks that contained them) fossils could be used to interpret past environments just blew my mind. And gaining the ability to visualize, in my minds eye, how a given rock formed (something I often to refer to as “looking beyond the rock”) felt like acquiring a superpower. So, while I came to my undergraduate degree wanting to study fossils, I left with a deeper appreciation of rocks – the context for fossils. So, l kept looking down, but my view of the ground became much, much bigger. From my undergraduate degree

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