OCTOBER 2006 ISSUE
Marc Boulet
STUDENT COLUMN
U of C Geoscience Creates New Vision for a New Year
Change does not necessarily assure progress, but progress
implacably requires change. Education is essential to change, for education creates
both new wants and the
ability to satisfy them.
- Henry Steele Commager
American Historian and Intellectual
BY MARC BOULET
University of Calgary
Student Columnist
(Geosciences)
I didn’t find geoscience; geoscience found me. Like many people, I didn’t know much about geology when I started attending university. I thought a geologist was a wild-eyed outdoorsman who searched for shiny gems in a featureless sea of grey and brown rocks (see the Treasure of the Sierra Madre for more info), and saw more in rocks than people (which is probably true for some).
Believing that living things were much more interesting, I started an after-degree in biology, and happened to take Geology 201 as an easy science filler.
I quickly caught the infectious enthusiasm and passion that Dr. Leslie Reid and Dr. Maureen Padden brought to the material in that introductory course, and began to appreciate the depth and importance that geology has brought to our understanding of the past and present. Thanks to their efforts, and those of many other excellent instructors at the U of C in the last three years, I will be proud to call myself a geoscientist after I graduate next year.
Great teaching has changed the course of my life and career.
Because of my own experience, news that the University of Calgary has established a new professorship in geoscience struck me as particularly momentous. The Tamaratt Teaching Professorship in Geoscience was brought to fruition by two highly accomplished U of C geology alumni, Matt Brister, P.Geol., and Tara Brister.
They have recognized the crucial role that instruction plays in the aggradation of scientific knowledge, and the need to integrate and develop new teaching methods suited specifically to geoscience. The professorship will aid in developing and implementing these new teaching methods with faculty and graduate students, and new equipment for use in lab and fieldwork.
This position, a three-way funding arrangement between the donors, the Faculty of Science and the university, is a major part of a new, grander vision for the U of C geology and geophysics department. This includes expanding research and studies in sedimentology, exploration geology, oil sands reservoir geoscience, water resources, sequence stratigraphy, petrophysics and advanced technologies — all with the ultimate goal to give us Canada’s top petroleum geoscience program, and one in top-tier globally.
In support of this endeavour, eight new academic positions have been created this year alone, with an equal number to come in the future.
An encouraging indicator of how this new vision will work is the extent of undergraduate student involvement in every aspect. Students have had the chance to sit in on the roundtables discussions that formulated the department’s goals, and each faculty position will have a student representative on the selection committee.
It is very clear that student input is now taken very seriously and will have a clear impact on the shape of things to come.
This makes the Bristers’ gift to the university and its students especially meaningful, and a sign of the importance they have placed on their educational experience. It is a potent indication to both current and former students that their university education will provide meaning and opportunity throughout their lives, well after the seemingly isolated world of textbooks and exams.
MORE INFORMATION
The Tamaratt Teaching Professorship
and current academic vacancies,
visit www.geo.ucalgary.ca