From Eighth Grade to Geoscience: Jasmine Gulick on the Journey with GeoForce @ UT Austin

What happens when a kid who finds geology “gross” ends up running a program that changes the lives of future earth scientists? Jasmine Gulick, the senior program coordinator for GeoForce, takes us on a whirlwind tour from eighth grade science fairs to field trips that shape careers. We talk about how GeoForce hooks students on geology, the unexpected journey to loving rocks and volcanoes, and why it’s not just about getting your hands dirty (but rather, about getting inspired to shape the future of our planet). Whether you're a future geologist or just someone who's still wondering what makes earth science so cool, this episode will make you rethink what rocks can really do.

 

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Transcript

very rich patron would maybe hire someone to, you know, study whatever they wanted to study, and that's like, this is the modern version of that.

Our patrons are now these big National Science Foundation or NASA grants, and you have to Have to ask your patrons for the money to keep researching. And universities themselves. Universities are the biggest funders of research. And that's a very special thing about the United States in general. There's a lot of really cool research being done all over the world and all over different institutions, but the U.

S. specifically has a, our university system has a very big emphasis on research, and being a research institution is a really big deal. Uh, so It's a really cool part about our education system. 

[00:56:43] Diya Gaur: And just like, to add on to that as well, like, I was actually researching this because I'm applying for college as well, right?

So I was wondering, like, for geology majors specifically, how do they get to go on exchanges to these different institutions and continue, like, studying geology there as an undergraduate major? How exactly is the process? And yeah. 

[00:57:04] Jasmine Gulick: Yeah, so they're different, just like any, um, major that you might be in. At any institution, there is study abroad opportunities, um, and some of those are major specific and some of them are generalized, uh, but certainly when it comes to UT, which is a rather large institution, there are several opportunities, uh, for our students to study abroad in different, uh, colleges that they have kind of a, an agreement with to study, specific things.

Um, it's also something that is very, very common in the field of geoscience when it comes to what's called your post doc, your post doctoral research. So in the geosciences, if you want to do research, uh, you have to get a doctorate. You can get a master's, you can get a bachelor's and do stuff, you can get a master's and do stuff, but if you want to specifically do research, it's really, really common that you need a doctorate degree.

So that final level, a PhD, um, of research and In the sciences, especially in the geosciences, you do get paid. So you don't ever have to pay to get your doctorate. Once you get to that level of graduate school, they pay you to get your doctoral degree. You usually actually get paid as part of one of those grants we were talking about.

So written in those grants is money for the researchers to have students working on that project. Um, so when you become a PhD student, you are assigned a specific research project that you're going to be working on, um, as part of your doctoral research. So you'll, you'll get your doctorate, and then you seek out opportunities, uh, to continue doing research.

These are, like I said, called postdocs, and those postdocs can take you all over the world. I know my dad, his first postdoc after he got his PhD was six months in Japan. Wow. So he went to Japan for six months, yeah, doing research with the Ring of Fire. Um, and there's a lot of opportunities like that. I know of researchers that went to