Exploring a Career in Geology

There are many ways to explore your interests in science, including classroom, laboratory, and field experiences.  You should, however, go beyond passively waiting for your life’s interests to be presented to you, and look beyond your own (small) world that is UW-Oshkosh. 

You can check out researchers on the ResearchGate web page, which is a good way to see what people are doing, see how much their research impacts the field, and download their papers.

Another convenient way explore research topics and researchers, that was not available to previous generations, is to search online for topics and scientists that are doing the type of work that interests you.  GeoRef is a very useful tool to explore topics, research that has been done in the past and the scientists who have done (and are likely doing research today).

To get started, explore work of scientists you know and perhaps have some knowledge of; this will allow you to see how this works under “controlled conditions”.  Follow the steps outlined below to get started.

1. Go to Polk Library’s web page.

2. Under the “My Quick Links” section (right side of library home page), choose Geology in the drop-down menu as the area you are interested in.

Go to the Georef link.

3. Input the name of the person you wish to investigate.  Start with someone you know and perhaps work with already.

a. Under “Select a field”, choose AU Author. If you get extra people in the results, then go to an example in which you know is correct and click on the correct name, this will screen out the other authors.

* When you do this you get a complete list of all types of publications.  You now need to eliminate the “noise”, A.K.A. conference abstracts, because they contain almost no data, no methods, and are un-reviewed (unscreened).  Abstracts are just statements that someone is doing, or thinking about doing research, but information presented may or may not be correct, important, or meaningful. If someone you are thinking about working with in graduate school has lots of abstracts, but few publications, this is considered a “red flag”.


* To do this, choose “Exclude Abstracts Only” on the left side of the page under “Refine your results”, and then hit “Update”. 

{Be aware that this does not exclude some conference abstracts considered “extended abstracts” such as those for the Institute on Lake Superior Geology meetings – but these are NOT peer-reviewed scientific publications.}

4. See what papers the scientist has published (Master’s and Ph.D. theses don’t count).  Do the papers sound interesting?  If so, then you may want to download them to explore further.


a. If the title(s) sound(s) interesting, then see what coauthors are listed.  Are any of the co-authors students?  This is a very important consideration – you want to work with someone who is going to make sure your work gets published!  You may have to do more detective work to find this out (download the paper; go to the scientist’s web site; do a Google search for the names, go to Google Scholar and look them up there.

5. For the scientists you evaluate:

a. What is their record of scientific work (number of scientific papers and over what time period)?  You want to work with an advisor who publishes their results.  That is a requirement in science*, and you want to work with someone who is going to make sure your results get published.

b. Summarize the areas of their research. Are students co-authors on their scientific papers?

1. Now that you know how to evaluate researchers, explore various topics that you are interested in, and use the techniques outlined above to narrow down potential graduate advisors.
   
   

* Science is a way of approaching problems in the natural world that involves asking questions that are testable (hypotheses).  This requires observations and gathering of data (qualitative and quantitative), and then analyzing this information.  To qualify as science, these observations and data must be published and publications must include information regarding methods used.  This is a means to allow others to retest and draw their own conclusions – these maybe consistent with the original ones, but this is not always the result.  This is where things get interesting!