Tuesday, November 5, 2013

A Trip to be Remembered; Questioned

The 125th GSA trip at the convention center in Denver proved to be helpful in many ways. First off, I was able to take away many learning outcomes from the trip. Some were geology related, others not.

Talks went on during the morning and afternoon sessions. They were about various fields of geology (mostly in-depth and specific) but applied towards teaching and other professions as well. A few of the talks that made a big impact on me, which is directly related to how much I understood, was a talk on "Peak Oil". Being something that I am interested in, I was shocked when I listened to some of the statistics and predictions about natural gas and its future. There are several different dynamics between the oil industry, marketing, and the consumers. However, these are unstable relationships and the market can become unpredictable.

Other conferences over glaciers, petrology, structural geology and various others proved to be useful to my learning as well.

I purpose a basic question of detail of analysis. I personally found talks that were more "inviting" towards undergraduates to be learning specific. Other talks on detailed studies, graphs, charts, etc... seemed to slip over my head.

Were most of the talks/poster presentations understood by colleagues? In what detail?


1 comment:

  1. Jason,

    Good post. In response to your question, the first day we were there, I tried to make a schedule which contained all of the sessions I thought were interesting in different classes. For instance, the first day I planned on going to talks about water on the moon, then talks about shale fracking, then talks about the laramide orogeny, and so on. Not only did I not have enough time to visit all these lectures, I was perplexed by them. Absolutely perplexed. The next day I decided to just find a room whose theme interested me and stay in it all morning or afternoon. This worked a lot better because I was able to attend more classes and I found that the introduction at the beginning of the session was really useful in elucidating the topic to me to the point where I could understand it better.

    David Keim

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