Long Overdue Update: New Job!

It has been a while since I’ve updated this page with a post, so this is long overdue. I’ll get the biggest update out of the way first: I’ve got a new position in a new state at a new university. My Postdoctoral Fellowship at VCU had two years of funding, but with the scarcity of DBER (Discipline Based Education Research) positions, I knew I couldn’t afford to sit a year out of the job market. The rate of tenure track geoscience education research positions posted each yearly hiring cycle seems to be one, maybe 2 if its a good year. I was fairly selective in the jobs I applied to, knowing I wanted to get out west for my next role, and the fact that I had a year of cushioning on my postdoc if I didn’t find anything. Since I didn’t need to take the ‘desperation shotgun approach’ and apply to everything I was remotely qualified for (I put in 25 applications last year); my total this year was four. Of those four, one was a TT GeoEd position at Utah Valley University. The others were all lecturer positions that interested me. Long stressful job story short, I had two campus interviews, got an offer from UVU, had to decline another really great offer, and withdrew from the other two after video interviews. I really think my postdoc experience made me much more competitive this go round, having landing interviews everywhere I applied. In the end, things worked out great and I’m happy to have landed the TT position on UVU!

I will say, I was a little sad that I was going to be leaving Richmond. It was a short year there, and I hardly got to know the city, but I loved it. I’ll surely miss the 5 minute walk to the James River and living across the street from Basic City Brewing RVA.

Before moving I did head out to Montana for another field season with Mary, Johan, and the crew from the Museum of the Rockies. This trip was short though, about a week, due to my impending move a week after returning. The first few days we did some unsuccessful prospecting, and then John, the MOR curator, made the decision to open up a quarry in the location where I found my first dino bone last summer. I was only there for the first two days of quarrying, and then we got rained out and it was time to return to Bozeman for the flight home. I hear they uncovered more bone at the site, but nothing articulated.

Once back from Montana, it was time to start the process of moving. The original plan for moving was to rent a 12′ Penske truck, drive my stuff to Utah, and figure out how to get my car later. But, when I went to pick up the truck, they ended up giving me a 16′ truck. It was bigger than needed, but it did mean that it had a towing hitch and I could trailer my car. Hmm. Only problem was my car was in Raleigh where I was going to store it until I could get it to Utah. Rachel, my amazing girlfriend who was the only helper in this process, and I made the game day decision to pack up the truck in a hurry and race to Raleigh to get a car carrier before the Raleigh Penske closed. We had a lot of reservations and anxiety about towing a car behind a 16′ Penske truck all the way from Raleigh to Utah, but in the end, it really wasn’t that bad, and ended up being fairly cheap since they charged me for a 12′ truck. We even had so much room in the truck, that we were able to throw my mattress down and sleep in the truck one night when we camped at Firerock Canyon in Wyoming.

I’ve now been in Utah for a little over a month getting settled in, and it is beautiful here. It’s a little nuts to be standing in the grocery store parking lot and this is your view:

I’m sure I’ll be numb to it eventually, but for now it’s pretty awesome. I’ve done a couple local hikes, including Mahogany Mtn North Summit and Lake Blanche. It was pretty cool to see the impressive glacial striations on the rocks around Lake Blanche. Also cool that I my students can easily go see these features that they learn about when we cover Alfred Wegener in class this week ( he used evidence of glaciation to support his continental drift hypothesis). The world class geology in this state will certainly make teaching fun, and hopefully very relevant for the students.