Losing Passion but Finding it Elsewhere

By the end of the fall semester last year, I was starting to lose interest in my schoolwork. My chemistry classes weren’t making enough of a connection to the environment for me and I wasn’t able to find that connection for myself.

I was glad I chose to go on the J Term trip Sustainable Public Policy in Arizona. Not only was the climate and landscape new and exciting, my education was focusing on the environment again. We traveled around Northern Arizona looking at sustainability through the lens of public policy and economics. As I mentioned in my previous post, we looked at sustainability through the lenses of water, immigration, National Parks, and Native Americans. We did a lot of hiking, for which the weather was perfect, and had the opportunity to explore a lot of the natural world in Arizona and see much of it from a great perspective. As a environmental science student, I had taken Environmental Geology and enjoyed relating what I learned in that course to the sustainability of Arizona’s geology, especially in Jerome, a mining town built into the mountainside where they have had a history of buildings sliding down the hill. I absolutely loved traveling to the National Parks and am keeping the National Park Service (NPS) on my list of potential employers for when I am ready to enter the workforce. Check out my photo blog for more stories about and photos from Arizona!

I also learned about the GeoCorps program between the NPS and Geological Society of America (GSA), while attending the GSA North East Regional conference in March with Z (Dr. Zsuzsanna Balogh-Brunstad), my academic advisor. The conference was at the Mount Washington Resort in New Hampshire and the snow cover was beautiful. Attending the conference with Z was very exciting for me because I had the opportunity to learn much about the environment from another perspective. I learned that geology is very interesting to me, but even more so I learned that the interface between geology and chemistry interests me. This interest was reinforced by my spring semester classes as well. I took Environmental Chemistry but the lab did not fit into my schedule so I took the geochemistry lab class.

I greatly enjoyed both. Environmental Chemistry took our fundamental chemistry knowledge and showed us how it applied to understanding and protecting the environment. The geochemistry lab was great because it showed me the environment from another perspective and also gave me a chance to share some of my chemistry knowledge with others since geology students don’t get as much of a chemistry background. My geochemical research of the Ouleout Creek also showed me that I enjoy the interface between geology and chemistry. This research also reinforces my idea that I really like to work with water since I enjoy this research and as I have mentioned before, I was excited to sign up for the water presentation when we were in Arizona.

This past spring I also started to move away from my traditional chemistry classes in another direction. I took two more political sciences classes with possible applications to the environment. Dr. Sara Rinfret was the Political Science professor who taught the Arizona class and she was my advisor for my summer internship with Roots & Wisdom last year. I decided to take two of her classes this spring, Regulatory Politics and Policy and Public Policy. If you had asked me in high school if I would ever take a political science class willingly I would have said no. I have learned, though, if you put the right spin on something you can find how to make it interesting to you. If there is a way to look at something with an environmental focus, I can develop a passion for it and find motivation through that passion. By the end of the semester, I enjoyed learning about policies and regulations. I now plan to graduate with a minor in political science. I think it is important for people in the science field to understand the public policy process so they can understand how their research can make a difference; it is also important for policy makers to understand the science relevant to the decisions they will be making. With all this knowledge, I went into my summer internship unsure about where I wanted my future to take me but excited to meet professionals in the environmental field and to learn more about working with a federal agency where environmental policies and regulations are very important.