Clara Stanbury

How will attending AGU advance your academic and career goals?

Attending AGU will provide me with the opportunity to present the skills and knowledge I have gained during this experience in a more formal environment than I have in the past. Poster presenting and public presenting are vital skills to anyone involved in research or science communication. I will gain valuable presenting experience by attending AGU to talk about my Geopaths experience. This will be an important learning experience for me as I continue my education in graduate school. I will appreciate the preparation and experience that this year’s AGU conference has provided me with before I enter a graduate program. AGU will also allow me to explore graduate school opportunities to investigate potential programs and advisors. I hope to attend a presentation in Geophysics and begin to investigate careers in Geophysics outside of the oil and gas industry. I am very interested in pursuing this route but would like to hear from people who are in the field now what they think of a more sustainable career in geophysics. I am interested in exploring graduate schools in Colorado and hope to meet with someone from Colorado School of Mines and Colorado University Boulder to learn more about their respective graduate programs. I have been investigating both schools online but would benefit greatly from having the chance to speak to people in the respective departments about their personal experiences. AGU will provide valuable presentation and networking opportunities to advance my academic goals.

What have you learned in your internship so far? (week 3 update)

I started interning with the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History on June 6^th of 2021. My project is ongoing and three pronged. The first prong is organizational; to inventory, record, and photograph their entire geology collection (which at this point I estimate to contain close to 800 specimens). The second prong is more outward: I am prototyping and testing a new mobile educational geology exhibit of my own design. The third prong is relational: I aim to gain a deeper understanding of how visitors interact with the museum and how best to facilitate this as a positive interaction. I have learned from each aspect of this project and know that I will only learn more as the internship continues. From inventorying, I have learned how to properly care for museum quality geologic specimens. I have also gained a working knowledge of the niche art of specimen photography. Before this internship, I had some experience in portrait photography, but I was not comfortable using the manual settings. In this internship, I was required to learn this skill and quickly was able to apply this to my own life, by using the manual settings on my personal camera. While prototyping the educational mobile museum, I quickly discovered that explaining erosion and tectonic activity to children is not easy. I will be running the mobile museum again soon and hope to test my new ideas of explaining these complex geological phenomena to a wide audience. My perception of visitor interaction has changed with each outreach event I have attended. Each event teaches me a new way to facilitate positive interactions.