May the Workforce Be With You (w/ Greg Shafer)

Welcome back to another episode of Epic Earth. Epic Earth is a podcast for those curious about the STEM fields and the awesome quirky and fun experiences and research that is taking place right now. This is episode number 19. May the workforce be with you. So hit that like follow or subscribe button, then sit back, relax and enjoy the ride as we take a journey around this Epic Earth. I found it also fascinating to learn all the information. Nobody told me I couldn't do it and I loved it. Now I know how to learn, like this is a doable thing. You know, that's an impact that we can't ignore. We're back with another episode of Epic Earth. I'm Ashley Bosa and with me as always, I have my co-host Brian Rosenblatt. Hey, happy to be here. And our returning co-host who's been here with us for the last couple of episodes, we're excited to have him back, Scott Gavain. Howdy. And so this week I'm going to go off on a rant, not really a rant, but there's a new video, the documentary on Disney+ called Fire of Love, and I know we're all into volcanoes, who doesn't love a good volcano story. But if you haven't seen this movie, I actually just started watching it last night. But it's about Katya and Marie's craft who were two volcanologists that were married. And they traveled around a lot together to all these crazy volcanoes. And they got some incredible footage, which is part of the documentary. A lot of it is based off of their footage that they caught, which is just insane. And as I was watching it, I was thinking, well, this is really great because it did advance a lot of the stuff that we undersea in about volcanoes, but in the same respect, a lot of what they did was kind of not the best scientific approach. They did some very dangerous things, they did a lot of stuff that a lot of volcanologists these days would not even consider doing. And so if you watch the video, I just want to make it very clear that we practice safe science here at BSU, but also a lot of agencies do as well. And that a lot of what they did, although it was commendable and they advance the science, it's not how we do science, and we don't recommend doing what they did. Unfortunately, what they did eventually got them killed, they were killed in a pyroclassic density current in 1991 by the ones in Japan, the Mount Ones, and yeah. And so it's kind of a really sad and tragic story. There's not a whole lot of us spoiler there because it's pretty well known that they got killed by a PDC, but anyway, that was my wrap. Watch it though. It's pretty awesome footage of volcanic stuff, and a lot of their stuff is what got me into volcanology in the first place, so watch out for PDCs. Oh, for sure, don't be near those active volcanoes. Pyroclassic density currents. One little comment on that, a lot of times documentaries purposefully try to look dangerous, they make things look more dangerous than they actually are nowadays, doesn't seem like that was the case for that one. Not in that, and it's because it's like their actual footage of them going and exploring these volcanoes. And they are literally standing right next to the vents, and they're picking up lava with their hands, obviously in the hazmat seeds and stuff, but it's still, you can see that it's burning their hands. One of them actually stepped into a Mod volcano and burned part of his life. It's just crazy what they were doing. I was sitting there in shock going like, "Oh my god, I would never do that." And so I think it's just like we have to remember that, yes, they were great in the science, but they were also a little silly, to say the least, so. Anyway, getting on to smart and commendable science, I'd like to introduce our guest for today. He's a third year PhD student here in the geoscience department at Boise State. He has a Master's degree in Geography from the University of Alabama. And he has two Bachelor of Science degrees, one in Wildlife and Fisheries Management, and another in Geology from West Virginia University. So he's got a pretty extensive background, hopefully we'll learn all about it. And right now he's actually, despite all of his field experiences, he's actually now working in Geoscience Education, which is a sort of new-ish, I would say, filled. But anyways, welcome, great shaper. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. We're excited to have you. And yeah, we're excited to learn about geoscience education and sort of a little bit more about what sort of your research looks like and what that field looks like. You haven't had a lot of educational people on our podcast, so. I think geoscience education really floats under the radar, especially within geosciences. It might think of field-heavy, quantitative work, and then you have geoscience education, which is really qualitative, kind of just slides under, and nobody notices it, yeah. Yeah, it's awesome, though. It is. I'm excited about it. Yeah. Very important. And so, to start us off, Greg, do you want to tell us a little bit about who you are? What makes you Greg? And now, what makes you, you? Hmm. So, I grew up in West Virginia, a pretty small town. The town that I lived in was called Duck West Virginia. Duck? Yep, duck. Duck West Virginia. Duck West, population was-- Spell-like duck? Yes. Population was 37. Wow. Nice. How many people had an address there? 36, including you. Yes. So, it was pretty small town, but I couldn't wait to get out. I joined the Marine Corps right as soon as I graduated high school, did six years active duty in the Marines. I was stationed in Camp Le Jun, did a couple of deployments that got me out to see the world. I was able to see 54 countries while I was-- yeah, while I was-- while I was in. But that didn't last forever. I got out in 2012, and I went to work for a fracking company in the Marcella Shale boom in West Virginia. It's like the middle-anx days there. So, it was West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio. A lot of drilling was happening in that 2010, the '14. So, I was part of that. That put me on the front line of seeing industry versus environmental problems. I'd only ever heard about it. I'd never actually seen it, but then actually working for it. I got to see a lot of this stuff, like a lot of the arguments from both sides. But I grew up pretty conservative in West Virginia, then once in the military, and then was part of working in the fracking industry. So, I leaned to that side whenever I got to that stage. But I was trying to understand the argument from the other side, and I didn't have the information that I needed to be able to understand their arguments. I decided I'd go to school, use my GI bill. So I enrolled at West Virginia University. Really wasn't sure of like what all they offered degree-wise. So, I just picked wildlife and fisheries resource management because I like to fish. And that degree makes you take four physical science classes outside of their curriculum. And I took all of my consecutively in geology, and I really liked it. And I talked to an advisor in the geology department. He was like, "You're very far along in getting a degree in geology. Would you like to switch over?" I was like, "Oh, I don't want to give up on wildlife and fisheries, so I just didn't both." And then I went on to do a master's degree at Alabama, and I didn't want to give up my background in fisheries management or my background in geology, so I tried to find something that combined them. So, the degree program was geography, but my research focused on eco-fluvial geomorphology, so that's really the interaction between living organisms and their environment. And my research specifically focused on how muscles, freshwater muscles, influence river morphology change. So, most people, if you talk to them in the geosciences that have an understanding of rivers, will tell you that a) biotic processes, drive biotic processes. So how the river is shaped and formed dictates what lives in it. That's not always the case. So what I found was muscles and big aggregations will modify the riverbed to their liking. And then that will cause some changes in the river morphology, and it just turns into a system. That's crazy. Yeah, they work together. Yep. I don't like your degrees. They're symbiotic. Yeah. They're working together. Yeah, so I was doing that, and I was loving it, and it was great. But I was attending a conference in Orange Beach, Alabama, was Alabama Water Resources conference. And somebody there at that conference asked me, "Hey, Greg, what are you going to do when you graduate?" I had to answer this. question yet. I haven't really put much thought into it either. I don't know. I don't know. What do you like about what you're doing? And the first thing that came to my mind was teaching. So while I was there, I was funded on a teaching assistantship as many of us are. And that was my first experience of teaching anything to anyone anywhere. And I loved it. It was great. I had so much fun doing it. But again, I didn't want to give up on geosciences. I was like, I'm really not sure. I told them that I like teaching. They're like, have you ever heard of geosciences education? And I said, no, I have no idea what that is. Like, I'm in geosciences, but I don't know what geosciences education is. Is that like teaching somebody something? And they're like, yeah, yeah. But there's a lot more to it than that. I was like, okay, so whenever we leave here, I'll go check it out. Well, I didn't waste any time. I actually went back to my room that night and hopped on the computer and started researching geosciences education. And I was like, oh, this is it. Like, this is what I want to do. Like, this is, this is where I want to take my career. And I started researching some of the heavy hitters in geosciences education. I stumbled upon a paper by Karen Viscupic, assistant professor in our department. And I was like, I've really liked the work that she's doing. So I reached out to her. And I told her I was like, you know, an email is like, hey, you know, this is my background. This is what I like to do. Are you taking PhD students? And she sat on that email for like a week and a half before she replied back to me. And she said, yes, how I'd like to take a PhD student, but I've never had a student before. So it might, some might view that as risky being, you know, the first time advisor advisor type of thing. And I was like, well, Karen, a good thing. I'm a risk taker. Let's do this. And the next summer, like during COVID, I took a position here as a PhD student with Karen and I've been working on geosciences education stuff for last three years. That's awesome. It seems like a nonlinear path, but also one which like all of the pieces just started to fit together. And you really are doing something that you're very passionate about. And that's awesome that you got to this point. It seems like all the chips aligned for you. Like you were able to find something that exactly encompassed everything you want. And that's really rare. That's awesome. Yeah. So I talk about this with my students a lot now. I always have students that are panicking about what they are going to do with their career. They're like, I don't know. And I keep telling you know, just be patient, relax. You might not have all the pieces yet. So I don't know how familiar you are with any kind of like career theories, but there's a career theory out there called planned happen stance theory that suggests that you don't have all the information yet to make your next decision. And as students like, especially as an undergraduate student, each semester, it's a new class, a new class. And some students come into their undergraduate degree being like, this is what I'm going to do. But you know, then they take a class and are like, oh wow, like I like this. And then they take another class and I'm like, oh wow, like this. And each one of those, each one of the steps you're presented with new information. And then you reassess and make a new decision. And sometimes you're going to take a career change, which is what I did at every single step. I made a career change. So yeah, some of us just, yeah, just take it as a whole and then think the career change later on. But no, that's true. I love that you tell students that I think it's important that not all of us figure out what we want to do in life at the age of 18. The stats, I don't even know the stats, but they're pretty high for people changing their degrees or their career paths several times during their lifetime. So if you don't have it figured out, it's okay to take the time to figure it out. And like you said, sometimes it's just about taking the classes and seeing, you know, what it is that you like or don't like about that. For me personally, I knew that going through my geology classes, I didn't want to do mineralogy and patrology. They were required courses. I'm glad I got the the expertise in it, but I knew right then I didn't want to stay behind a microscope, you know, and then I had to reassess, okay, like if I'm not going to do that, what is it I'm going to do with volcanology? Right. It's an iterative process. Completely. Yeah. Awesome. So I'm going to jump back a little ways, well, a long way. So I just want to highlight that Greg, at least he used to, have a lump of coal. You had an actual lump of coal on your desk. I thought you had it. Yeah. And so is that correct me if I'm wrong? That is like a family tradition. Like your family was in mining coal mining. Is that right? Yep. So my pretty much every one of my dads out of my family has been in coal mining for some period of time. Even my grandma, my grandma likes to tell the stories of back in the 70s. She used to drive one of these big, huge rock trucks on a street mine. Oh my gosh. Yeah. Your grandma. Yeah, my grandma. That's awesome. Yeah, so that's a completely different world from from I know like what at least Brian, well, and Scott and I grew up in, you know, in the west, coal is almost nowhere to be found except in some, you know, shale deposits and things like that. But like that's it's crazy to me. Like on the west are the east coast. There's so much of that. It's so rampant. It's like, aren't used to be. It's, it's really, it's really condensed on the east coast to that eastern Kentucky, West Virginia, Southern Pennsylvania. Like that's about all of it right there. But you can think about coal mining as like, you know, ranching out here on the west, you know, so it's like the lifestyle that people have. I think about it more like, you know, it doesn't employ a lot of people. But to those people that it does employ, it is like everything to them. So all the towns in West Virginia, especially like the one I grew up in, it's all like heavily reliant on coal, you know, coal like employees 10 or 15,000 people in West Virginia in a state that has 2 million people lives in it. You think that's not a lot of people. But it really, really has an impact on those local towns. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's really interesting to see, especially like the controversy of using coal in terms of like fuel sources and things like that. Energy sources. Yeah. And I'm sure it impacts those places much heavier than somewhere out west where we're like, whatever coal. Oh, and the health risks to being involved in that as well. Yeah. Did you ever want to get into coal mining since it's so heavily like ingrained in your family's past? Was that ever a path that you have thought you wanted to take? It wasn't really a path that I was really sought after, like I really wanted to go do. But whenever I got out of the military, I wasn't really sure what I was going to do. I didn't have, I didn't know how to use the background that I had the skills that I gained in military to put that into a job application and get a job that I wanted. So I actually did start with dad on a strip mine right after I got out in the military. And that was at the same point time in 2012 when the Obama administration was putting in those clean air act, the emission stuff, like they were really hitting the coal industry hard then. And I worked on that coal mine for about seven hours and they brought everybody in the office and like we're shutting the mine down. Wow. So I went seven hours of exciting. So I worked on a coal mine for seven hours. Nice. But I took my minor safety course, passed that. I studied really hard for it. And then got my certification and worked seven hours in the coal mine. And then they shut it down and I was like, oh, what am I going to do? My grandpa sent me up with somebody that he knew in the oil and gas industry. That's how that got started. That's, uh, that's, well, you know what? It's a resume builder, whatever. I don't even put it on there. Anymore. They were, they handwritten me a check for those seven hours. They're like, here's your ten dollars in cash. That's, that's crazy. Yeah, that's pretty wild. Yeah. So sort of jumping back now into your research. So you sort of made this transition and maybe I mean, you said that you grew up really conservative and that you sort of always lean towards the oil and gas and that sort of industry is being like this is fine and it's great for the environment. And now you're transitioning into sort of the geoscience side of things. You're seeing how things impact environmental, you know, with the muscles and the processes that go on. So can I just ask and feel free not to answer? But where, where are you now in terms of like, not maybe not politically, but just how you view environmental interactions with those, those industries? That's a, that's a, I've answered this question a couple of times and not, but not recently though. And I think my perspective since I answered this last exchange a little bit. But, you know, I was, I was pretty far to the right prior to joining college, I would say like probably 75th percentile. And then I joined a college and that experience of being an undergrad changed me more as a person than anything else I did in my life that I've done. That includes going to war. So you just get so much information, your mind has opened up to so much in college. But having gone through that, that calls me to lean pretty far to the left. And probably not as far as I was leaning to the right before, but pretty far to the left. Now I like to think that I'm somewhere like right in the middle. I've learned to not talk down or up about either side but rather just collect the information and use it how you see fit. So that's what I would like try to give to my students. I don't want them to think that coal mining is bad. I don't want them to think environmentalists are killing the economy. I just want them to have all of the information and then they can do with that. Yes. You would be a good governmental employee, I thought that, but I don't like being in the spotlight. I would like to be somebody's right hand person, to give them the information and let them go out and stay on the camera. Yeah. I don't want to be in front of camera. Greg for President. Yeah. I'll love for you. Yeah, that's interesting and the reason why I brought that up, Greg is because I do think that we all have opinions about things and a lot of that is either where we grow up and how we grow up in the environments of which we grow up in and a lot of it is our family history on things, but yeah, it's interesting that as you get older, you just transition into these different ideologies basically and it's nice to know that we have people in the field leading that way of being somewhere in the middle, yeah, all oil and gas isn't bad, right? All coal mining probably isn't bad. I'm putting that in quotes because I actually, the facts I don't know, but it's nice when I hear that there are agencies and industries and people like you who actually just try to give the facts, right, because that's what the science is about, like here are the facts. We don't have to put political opinions on it. We don't have to put, you know, our own agenda on it, we're just giving you the facts. This is what the stats and the quantitative measurements or the qualitative measurements tell us and now you can go out and make your own educated decision on which side of that you want to be on. Yeah, and the something that I've been thinking a lot about with how polarized things have been lately is that I think we all need the skills to be able to communicate with both sides. People who lean very far on the right, people who lean very far on the left, if more people can be sort of mediators for these two sides that honestly hate each other sometimes, like I think the world would be a better place and you're great for that. There's so much information out there that you can find any information that you want to fit the narrative that you already have made up. True. Or, or, or, you can collect all the information and build a narrative from it. Yes. And that's what we need more of the latter. Yes. Yeah. Something that is kind of interesting is how that's so ingrained into geosciences, like there is like a political, like bias kind of ingrained and whereas like in physics, I can just present these physics theories, there's like no bias involved in it at all. I don't have to tell them, and was a good person or a bad person like Einstein wasn't necessarily a great person. It's just like this is the math, this is the facts, like it's because nobody's politicized physics. Yeah. Yet. Yeah. Yeah. He said it now, Scott. Just kidding. Um. Well, yeah. That's, that's great to hear and it's nice to know that there's, there's people advocating for the middle line basically and just thinking your own educated decisions, which is something I feel like we need a lot of these days. Do you find it hard to stay unbiased when you're presenting facts, does it ever slip through anything? I mean, yeah. It comes out sometimes. I, you know, I have my, my opinions on plan everything, and I try to keep them just completely out of it, but they come out every now and then. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I keep trying to tell myself like all you're doing is giving the information. You're not. But every now and then somebody asks me like, what is your opinion, and then I'll tell them. Yeah. Yeah. That's fair. I mean, everyone who works for the FBI has some sort of opinion about something, right? But they're required to be pretty middleman. They're supposed to be. Cool, so hopping back to your research because I feel like a lot of what your, your personality and just your agenda are telling us is that you're actually a good, good skill set for this geoscience education. So what sort of research are you working on at the moment through this program that you're doing? Yeah. So I have a few different things going right now, but they all really fall under the umbrella of workforce development for our undergraduates, so everything that I do is specifically focused around our undergrads and geosciences. Recently I had a paper accepted, I'm still going through the review process of the first part of my research. Congrats. Yeah, thanks. That was, that was a real process. Oh, yeah. I also just got a paper published, and yeah, the hardest thing I've ever done in my life, so just it beats on you. Yeah. I was not prepared for it. And now I'm done. And like, all right, let's do another one. Yeah, you quickly repressed the memories of reviewer number two. It was, it was reviewer number two. Yeah. Like how, oh, where does your career path have to go to wind up being reviewer number two? What happened to this book? What I want to know is the questions they're asking reviewer number two before they ask them to review a paper like, how mean are you going to be? Just to notice, if you're a reviewer number two, just don't take offense to this. Yeah. If you're listening right now, you're a reviewer number two. Actually, my reviewer number two is quite nice. Okay. So, I got away with not having a reviewer number two. Anyway, sorry. So, yeah. Continue on. So, all your work's done with undergraduates. Yeah. So, the first part of it that we're almost have published, that was looking at workforce skills that our undergraduates are going, they're going to need to have whenever they enter the workforce. So, you know, soft skills like written in oral communication, all the way to hard skills, like spatial and temporal understanding. There's, this is a new, like people have tried to tackle this before, and actually there was recently a publication that come out in 2021 called the Vision and Change of Geosciences. If you haven't looked at that, you should check it out. That talks about, you know, the transitioning from undergrad and graduate school to the workforce. So, if you're about to make that step, it's something you should check out. And, there's been other publications that have looked at specific workforce skills, but not a lot of them have taken into account employer opinions and what they've thought. The Vision and Change had had a few dozen employers, and then there was another study that looked at teamwork skills that had five or six employers that were interviewed in that study. So, not a lot of employers have been asked about this. And specifically, like those studies, the one in the Vision and Change, they were pretty heavy on oil and gas. And oil and gas doesn't employ a lot of geosciences undergrad, with it's only like 6%. But those employers who participated in that study were always, there were a lot of them from oil and gas, like a quarter of them. So, what we wanted to do was survey or get opinions from a wide range of employers and geosciences. So, if you don't know geosciences, it's very, very broad. You can work almost anywhere with a geoscience degree. I was recently talking to a friend that's now a geologist in the finance industry. He works for a bank. Yeah. So, that shows that you can go a lot of different places with it. And students of faculty don't, I mean some faculty do, but a lot of faculty don't know where their students can go to work after they graduate. So, I wanted opinions or views from a whole range of employers. And one way that we, the way that we decided to do that was to read through job advertisements. So, job ads are a direct line of communication, and usually the first line of communication between an employer and a potential employee. That's the first communication. going to happen right there. And employers generally put what is essential for that position skill wise in an advertisement. So we went through and read through each one of them actually writes MATLAB code to read through it for me. Made it a lot faster and more accurate because some of those times when I'm three or four hundred ads deep and it's like midnight I might breeze over or something. MATLAB won't breeze over it. But yeah that's that's the word that we that we just finished. And so what are some of the like top two or three most requested skill sets that these agencies or job advertisements are? Yeah so it was very specific to industry sector or the occupation. So industry sector meeting like the environmental sector doing consulting stuff or whether you're working for the federal government or stuff like that. And then occupation you can be a geologist, a geoscientist, an environmental scientist, a soil and plant scientist like all that falls under the realm of geoscience. So it was specific to whichever one whichever career path you choose. But written communication and field skills transcended occupation and sector. So a lot of employers like 75% of the ads that I looked at requested some kind of field skills. That was sometimes most of that time they actually didn't say what field skills they were looking for. They just said you're going to be doing some work in the field. That didn't say specifically what it was. But some of them didn't say specifically like you're going to you're going to go out to a site and you're going to assess it and evaluate it for us to see if it fits our agenda or you're just going to go out and we've got some wells set up. You're going to go out monitor those wells like 50 or 60 wells. You're going to keep making your rounds and monitoring those. But then written communication was was really highly sought after. So our students need to be able to write. And that mostly came in the form of report writing. So I'm kind of report that states and summarizes the work that you did. Yeah, interesting. And are all of these job advertisements just from recent years like I've you've gone back and looked at like retrospectively some of the job advertisements and seen if there's been transitional any transitions and what these jobs are requiring in terms of skill sets or no, so I didn't go back and I haven't I've going back and look prior to the years that we collected. So I collected advertisements from May to November of 2020. And I got the amount that I wanted to make my the do my analysis. But that was right at the height of COVID taking off and I wasn't sure if that had any effect on hiring. So repeat it behind a desk. So I repeated the process and May to November of 2021. I collected just about the same amount of advertisements and then you know scanned them against each other to see if there were any major differences and there wasn't. So I didn't make that comparison. That's a result right there too. That's pretty cool. Yeah. So there was no changes there. But you know the workforce in geosciences is always changing. There's always some kind of new technology coming out. I mean there's always there's some stuff going on in a third floor lab like you are constantly turning out new new tools in there. Yeah. So the technology is advancing rapidly and the needs and the stuff that we need to tackle the challenges of the environment is always changing. So you know those skills are not static. They're gonna change. Maybe not a lot. I'd say stuff like field skills and ring communication are always gonna be you know front runners. But some of the stuff that I didn't see quite as often might pop up five, 10 years down the road is being important. So I think it's worth doing this study again. Hopefully there's an eager graduate student 10 years from now. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like just from personal experience like five years ago you know GIS was the big thing. And I mean a GIS still plays a large part in our in our field. But I feel now it's transitioned more into coding. Like you have to know coding in order to get some of these these higher up jobs that require you to you know know the language behind what's happening in your computer which is fun. So who knows another five years it could just be something completely different which is you know. We used to joke around that GIS did for guaranteed income source because if you do GIS you definitely get a job and I still think you would like a lot of jobs and maybe Greg I don't know if you can speak to this but GIS is still highly sought after skill that a lot of these job sectors are looking for. Yeah it's out there a lot. There's a lot of employers asking for it and it ranges to like some employers want you to know really in depth how to use GIS. And then some of them are just like be familiar with it. If if somebody if our GIS person comes to you with like a question be able to know what they're talking about. You don't have to be able to open up the app. Just yeah just speak the GIS language. Yeah. I predict in ten years that machine learning is going to be like the standard. That's a huge one these days machine learning is taking off because you know we don't want to mechanically do everything to automate these processes. It's getting more accessible and therefore it's I think it's just going to continue to explode. Hopefully we'll have an easier way of teaching it. Yeah I'm in a machine learning class right now and it's not simple. It's not too bad but it's really not simple. Right. So this is really exciting. It sounds like you're sort of pioneering some things in the field of geoscience education. What is the most fun thing that you do regarding your research or your just your PhD? What do you like to do? Yeah so if you were to ask me this when I was doing my master's degree I would say fieldwork. Love going out working in the field. But my field now is in the computer. I work in my cube and I don't leave it. So there's no more fieldwork for me. But now my fun I get all of that from working with undergrads. So I didn't do that when I first started working here. I was mostly focused on my research. But then once I you know became part of the department learned who the undergrads were and you know what their curriculum looks like like the steps that they have to go to get their degree. I could communicate better with them and I like to think of myself as like a first line for them to ask questions. Just you know if you have something that's bugging you you know if you have a problem on your resume that you want to work with or you're about to apply for this job and in our faculty run around in the department and if you peek in in in their office and look at it and they're just plugging away and looking at beaters and they just look so busy and and to an undergrad. I don't know if it was like that whenever you all were undergrad when I was in undergrad that was intimidating. Oh yeah. Intimidating as a grad student. Yeah. So I come from the from the military lifestyle where I think it's like super structured and I actually thought that I had to follow a chain of command to talk to a to a professor. So I had to go through the graduate students first to then be able to. Oh my god. That took a long time for me to learn. It's not like that. It's like no please just email me. Right. So and and that's intimidating for an undergrad. So hopefully I'm a less intimidating face that they can just pop in real quick and I'll be like yeah you know let's talk about your resume. Let's talk about this job that you plan on applying to. So one of your former students I think that you are very not intimidating. Okay. Yeah. You didn't create that helping me understand geomorphology. So thank you. Speaking of geomorphology I get to be the instructor of record for that next year which I'm really excited about. It'd be my first class that I have all to myself. Wow. It could be awesome. It's gonna be so cool. I'm really excited. Great is a great teacher and we're gonna find out. Well regardless you'll be really approachable. So that's exciting and that's really cool and it's nice to have someone in the department who is someone for the undergrad Salina. You know sometimes yeah undergrad gets sort of lost in the system a little bit so. Yeah it's it's really hard for me to figure out where to draw the line between you know working with the undergrad. So it's an actually completing my research because I don't really I don't take a link to collect all of my duties to go help an undergrad. Yeah. I think a lot of us in this room are like that actually. In fact all of us in this room right now are like that which is don't tell our advisors. Yeah well it's awesome. Greg we're happy to have you as part of our department we think you're doing an amazing job. So if you could describe your work using an analogy like what would you use? Oh yeah so hmm I guess there's the analogy that the teacher is like a compass so they guide you when you go. your way through your undergrad to your career? Well, I like to think of my research as the calibration of that compass. So, you know, because geoscience is constantly changing, so should our education techniques and the information we're giving students and I'm hopefully collected enough of that information to then get to departments where they can, you know, recalibrate their teaching practices to better fit, you know, what our students are going to encounter. I like that. Let me ask you a follow-up question. Are you pointing towards true North? Or are you pointing towards magnetic North? One's a good one. Maybe somewhere in between over that. He's the middle man. Oh, I think he might be pointing towards magnetic North because that's what it is. That's what's moving. Yeah, and that's where we need to set that reference to to really know where true North is. That's good. I like it. Beautiful. That's what I'll use from now on. You answered your own question. Well, with guidance, with the compass of Greg. Yeah, you're going to do a great teaching job, Greg. So, Greg, you've had both experiences out in the field and behind your computer. In your research. So, can you just tell us, do you have any fun stories from both of those scenarios that you can. So, fun from the field or fun from the field? Fun. Yeah. Well, fun, you know, fun stories from my field of study currently. I was recently at a conference. It's called the Earth Indicator Girondevoo. Rondevoo? Oh, yes. Oh, fancy. Yeah, it was fancy. It was really expensive to go there, but thankfully, Karen Pete ordered it. Or was it Minnesota and Minneapolis? It was my first time actually being there. It was really cool. But it was all about undergraduate education and how we can, as Earth educators, do a better job at it. And I was in this workshop with all these academics. There was only like three graduate students that were in there. And it was there was probably 30 people or so in there. And they were giving all these suggestions about how to better prepare students for the workforce and how to ensure that students are successful in making their transition to the workforce. And they were having these, you know, somebody would say something and somebody else would be like, "Oh, you know, but I only more this way, I think this is the better approach." And then somebody else would be like, "Oh, you know, this is the better approach." And while all that was going on, I got a text message from one of my students who the previous week, I had been, actually for months, we had been helping her try to get this hydrology internship. And she got it. And she sent me that text while that was all going on. And I laughed, out loud. I allowed. I literally. And the people at my table, we had to set randomly so I didn't have the people at my table. And they were like, "What are you laughing about?" I was like, "Well, well, all you are arguing about how to get your students employed, I'm over here doing it." And I showed them that. And I felt like, I was so proud of myself for like 30 seconds, and then it just made me realize that. That's awesome. Yeah. Education's a tough one because a lot of it is theoretical. And then the application of it is quite different from what sometimes you learn or what you think is the best way of going about things. So it's really cool that you could just like, "Pau, like, this is how you do it." Or, "This is what I did." And like, it worked, you know? But it might not work that way for every student that you come across, right? So yeah, that's awesome. You know, every classroom that you as an instructor in, it's like the class has a mind of its own. And every one of them are completely different. And I was at Alabama each semester. We had the TA three labs of 30 students. So at 90 students, each semester across three different classes, and all three of them would always be completely different. And I would have to approach how I taught each one of those classes just slightly different to match the personality of the class. You think it's like a group thing? Yeah, I mean, sometimes you'll get a classroom of 30 students who nobody knows anybody because these are inter-level introductory classes where students from the whole university are taking them. And then sometimes you'll get a group of students who have been friends forever, where you'll get a group of athletes who all know each other. And each, each dynamic, you know, is different totally. I experience that same thing. I'm teaching six credits of physics lab and also like 24 students per lab. And the dynamics super different, also depending on the day, like the 10, or the Friday at 10, 30 in the morning classes, a lot different than my Wednesday at 10, 30 class, energy-wise. And also just the way that the schedules line up by end of getting a lot of similar majors in different classes. So like I almost have a full like kinesiology physics lab, a full construction management physics lab, and just the way, the way that I have to approach the science to them to like get them to be excited about it's definitely like a lot different. Do you like a class that has more or less energy? I like more energy, for sure. Definitely. I feel like you can channel that to, to, to. Absolutely, absolutely. But it's hard to get a class with no energy going on. So I actually started this little experiment myself. I told the students to rate the labs on how comfortable they felt on the topic after the lab. And if the first week was super interesting, because the people that rated it higher, they were the ones who didn't ask me questions about it. They ended up getting worse scores on their lab report. Then the people who had less confidence and were like asking me more questions about it. And like that's the energy's coming from them like talking to me and like having a discussion about the topic basically. So I think in the end they ended up learning more than the the students that didn't ask the questions, even though they felt more comfortable with it. So. Yeah, and I think that's one of the most important parts of being an instructor is how to promote that kind of interaction. Yeah. And get that going to where that just becomes natural. Like you don't have to push to get them to interact with you. They just, they do it organically. The other thing is the jokes. I'll occasionally make like a joke and I'll make it to all my classes. And sometimes it hits really hard and other times like nobody laughs at all. So it's like I don't know what that's like. It gets in the background. Yeah. No. Yeah. That's like one time my class like cracked up laughing. We were laughing for like a minute. And then the other time like nobody laughed at all. Not even a pity laugh. Like maybe a little bit of chuckle. But then I was like oh that hit really really well with my other class students. When your instructor goes out of their way to make a horrible joke, sometimes a pity laugh is, is, is appreciated. Yeah. Yeah. I don't want your pity. That's, that's awesome though. I'm what a cool experience. Especially on a rendezvous. Right. Yeah. So what about out in the field? Like field filled? Yeah. So before I started this and everything that I did was pretty field heavy. My master's degree was very field heavy. A lot of field work there. With this one time that I was, I was working in the field. I was by myself. And I was out collecting data in the Sipsy River of Alabama. So the reason why I chose that river is because it's completely, what's not completely, but it's really unaltered by humans. There's three bridges that cross that river and that's the only interaction on that watershed, the whole watershed. And that river is like 70 miles long. Wow. So if there is something that reflects a natural system, it would be that river. So that's why I was doing my measurements there. So it's pretty remote. There's a few houses that have close to the banks. And I had access to, to part of the river through the property owner who had an agreement with the biology department at UA. And while I was out there, I was, I was taking these bank measurements and I had this fancy gizmo that I was out there measuring the height of the bank and the angle and, you know, the different layers that were in there to soil. And in the rivers and the south, there are a lot of trees that hang out over the bank. It kind of creates a canopy over the river. And I was walking up underneath one of those trees and I was pushing the branches out of the way so I could see the bank and I pushed a branch out of the way and there was a cotton mouth sitting on the limb looking right at me. So cotton mouth is a venomous snake in the south and they have a reputation of just being evil. And I was like, oh no, like I'm not here by myself. What am I going to do? And I'm not really afraid of snakes, but I, you know, I knew that situation was pretty bad if I would have gotten bitten. Yeah. So it's like, I'll just back away and come back to the spot in a little bit to see if it's moved. And as soon as I started to move backwards, it fell out of the tree in the water. So this, this snakes have a reputation too of like just being kamikaze. So they'll just like drop out of the trees right on you. The land and people's boats, it's like if you're boating down the river down there, you have to be cognizant of what's in the trees of love because they'll fall into the boat. And the water there is constantly milky. So you can't see very far into it. And that snake hit the water and just disappeared. And I'm like panicking but it's gone by me like under the water. And I have my waders on and I'm trying to like get out of there and I turn around and I hit my chin on a cypress knee. So cypress trees grow up. up in the south and when they die they leave behind their roots and they stay there for a long time. They call them Cyprus needs and they hurt. They're really painful if you kick one and if they're under the water you can't see them. So I turned and I kicked one of those and I fell and I fell in over my waiters and the water was only like 5 feet deep and it really wasn't that cold so I probably could have been without the waiters but I hadn't won anyway and if you've ever been in waiters and you fill them up with water you go from being like 150 pounds to like 500 pounds so impossible to move. So here I am in this river with machine hurting my waiters pool of water I'm like flailing in the water trying to get to the other side to get out on the bank and there's this just like 800 foot long terrifying snake trying to get me in the water. Maybe I'm exaggerating a little bit, but how long are they actually doing? They're not that big, probably three feet. Three okay. I mean they grew bigger small of that the most of them around that length. Okay. Anyway I get to the bank on the other side I didn't get snake bit but I crawl out and the property owner was standing there and watched the whole thing and he's like crying laughing so hard at my unfortunate situation. At least somebody got a good laugh at it. And you're alive so. Yeah animal life. Oh my god that's really funny. I'm not a big fan of snakes. I thought rattlesnakes are bad. If I saw a continental though it'd be it for me. I'd be like I'm never doing the word ever again. Now questioning whether all of the times in the field where I've had embarrassing things happen to me and I thought I was alone. I wonder if there was someone watching. So you're never alone Scott. Never. Those are pretty funny. That's good. Yeah those are good stories. I like those stories. Good campfire stories. Yes. Well we normally do some other segments but I think we're going to actually maybe wrap up your awesome conversation that we've had today. So I'm going to ask you some more serious questions. Serious question. So we're going to do a would you rather sort of scenario? Very serious. So the first one is would you rather always have Cheeto dust like Cheeto's the snack on your hands or always have jelly on your feet? If I lick that Cheeto dust off my finger does it repopulate and I can do it easily? Definitely the Cheeto dust. We're into the Cheeto dust. I like it. You definitely need like a permanent thing over your keyboard. That's perfectly fine. He'll get out on his keyboard because then he could lick his keyboard. It's like God. Okay second one would you rather sweat honey or always smell like cabbage? That's brutal. Smell like cabbage. I can plug my eyes. Really? Wow. I don't like being sticky. That's why I didn't like the South. You were literally sweating honey down there. What about you guys? Scott? I agree. I would not like to be sticky with honey all the time. I sweat a lot. So if I'm like the Cheeto dust off my fingers, I don't want honey in there. Oh yeah. It could be a really nice combination. I don't know. I'm going to have to try that. Be a new flavor. Imagine the Cheeto particles will sort of clump with the honey and I don't think it would be very good. Without you Brian. I don't really sweat that much so I might say honey. The thing I'd have to consider is that the honey would evaporate off of me. Still and cool me down because if it wouldn't do that then sweating would probably make me more hot and that would probably be problematic for exercising and whatnot. This is how scientists take your simple matter question and look way out of purview. This is right. This is why I'm asking the questions. We get the most complicated answer. I'm sure Brian's going to go home and calculate like the ratio of honey to cabbage. Yeah. Okay. Would you rather have lobster claws for hands or squid tentacles for legs? Just two tentacles or like eight tentacles. Good question. I would say like squidward. Yeah, like you. Yeah. Squidward or Mr. Crafts. Yeah, I think I would go squidward. Yeah, I feel like lobster claws would be really hard to do any way. Would you rather have a baby giraffe or a baby elephant as a pet? Oh, elephant. Yeah. Yeah. Why? They're adorable. And they play a lot. They are. I don't know what baby giraffes do. I think they're so adorable. Yeah, I don't think I've seen one either. And they're probably bigger than me. Oh, they're really big still. I think they're still probably like taller than a human I think. I don't know. Baby giraffes? I thought so. I think they can't even stand when they're first born. Oh, yeah. Clumsy little. They like fall when they're born because their moms are so tall they fall. And that fall is what like snaps the umbilical cord. Then they just hit the ground like pretty hard. And like I saw this on National Geographic a while ago. I'm not exactly sure, but I'm pretty sure it like hits the ground and then like takes like a day for it to be a little like get up and actually like start walking around and whatnot. Yeah, I've heard that too. Now I just feel traumatized by this experience. Welcome to National Geographic. No, that's awesome. That's you learn something new every day. Yeah. Okay. Sort of like a last question more philosophical because I feel like I always ask people this question. It kind of goes along with what I ask them. So I always ask people like would you rather spend a lifetime out in space or a lifetime in the deep ocean here on earth. So would you rather have a rocket ship or submarine? I like the water. Yeah. So I probably have a submarine. Yeah. There's some cool crazy things down in the ocean. Yeah. I just saw that some company is putting on their they're now taking tickets for a submarine ride down to see the Titanic. Really? It's like $250,000. You can ride down to the Titanic. And you like watch Titanic as you're going down. The best way to throw away 250 grand tonight. Yeah, when I win the lottery, I think I probably still won't spend money on that, but I don't know. I wonder how long of a trip it would be. I don't know to get down there. Is it it's a mile down or so? I mean I guess it's kind of cool, but 250 grand. Wow. Well it's versus how many millions of dollars it takes for you or eight seconds in space. That's fair. That's fair. That's true. And you don't even go to space. You just go to like the edge of the atmosphere. Right. I would totally do that over Jeff Bezos's crap, right? What about you guys? Would you rather have a rocket ship or submarine? He's got to be a rocket ship. Yeah. I figured the physics guy would say rocket ship. It'd be close for me. I don't know. Because I think the rocket ship I lean towards because I could take a rocket ship to an Earth like planet and then explore like other oceans and other, I could see more has a bigger payoff in my in my mind. Maybe you just have like a hovercraft with a rocket ship end of submarine a rocket submarine craft that could go into an environment. I'm changing my answer now actually because I probably waste a lot of my life in outer space just flying to the next planet. And like I wouldn't have enough time to like actually look at things you could hybridate. Yeah. It depends on what's what's allowed a lot of it. But if we just have regular technology on our side and maybe I think I'd actually do a submarine because I'd be able to investigate a lot more. That's true. Yeah. My whole life would just be like getting the different planets here and that's all I'd be able to really look at. And there's a lot of nothing in space. Yeah. So yeah. It's a lot of cult space. You're going to need a lot of good books or something on submarines. Great. Thank you so much for coming on our podcast. You are awesome. We're so proud to have you and to you know, claim you as one of our own. Yeah. I was I was excited whenever you offered me the opportunity to do this. Yeah. We'll come back and visit us and we'll keep people updated on your on your progress. Yeah. For sure. You're going to do amazing things. Yeah. Congrats again on your publication. Thanks. It's such a way to lift it. Yeah. Cool. Well, thanks again. Yeah. Thanks, Greg. Have an epic day. Well, that was an epic conversation. We'd like to thank all of our listeners. Tune in next time for another epic Earth podcast. Let's do one more sound check. I'm Brian. I just put one microphone now. I'm Greg. I'm now further away from the microphone. I'm Ashley and I am in the same spot. I'm microphone and I'm further away from Scott.