 
My name is Josh Feinberg. I'm the Director of undergrad studies
for the Department of Earth Sciences.
I'm an associate professor here at the University of Minnesota.
I teach courses on natural hazards and disasters
and how our communities can live more sustainably.
My favorite class to teach though, is our field geology course.
This is a course where I take all of
the majors at the time. Usually it's somewhere between
20 to 30 students. We drive them all the way out to Montana
and we teach them how to map the rocks under their feet.
So we're teaching people how to map folds
and faults. How to create cross sections so they can predict
where you're going to find particular layers underground.
Where you may find water. Where you may find contaminant plumes that you want to clean up.
Being in the field for almost a month
with our students out in Montana teaching them how to interpret the landscape
is one of the most rewarding experiences I have here as a professor.
One of the great things about our department is
most of our classes are on the range of around
15 to 20 students and that's
just small enough so that we can break them up to work in small groups.
And so that small group work is really
where a lot of the fun happens, to be honest.
Almost every single one of our students has a chance to do
a research internship with one of the many different professors in our department.
So you really get, literally, a one to one relationship
with that student as you're trying to teach them how to use
all of this incredible experimentation in your lab
how to collect the data responsibly, how to interpret it
and how to share it with others so you can actually describe what your science is.
Some of the courses that are just a lot of fun
are courses like geomorphology
where you try to understand how the shape of the surface of the earth
can actually tell you about processes that were operating in the past.
So for example, much of Minnesota has the history of
recent glaciation.
and our students actually get to travel all around the state
looking at the different ways that glaciers carved out
the surface to what we see today.
Geology can actually open up a much broader array of
potential employment than you might initially think.
A lot of times we have students
who are finding geologist positions or earth scientist positions
in places like the Minnesota Department of Transportation,
the Minnesota Department of Health. Those are both
agencies that I know hire a lot of geologists.
Some of our undergraduates also decide
to use the skills that they've gathered within the Earth Sciences program
and apply to things like landscape architecture
or urban design for more sustainable communities where they're using all of that
scientific knowledge about the way that the world works and the earth works
and the systems that are operating on it
at a variety of different time scales
and they apply that to try to create more sustainable communities.
I decided to go into geology
when I was an undergraduate and the reason I went into it
originally was based purely out of curiosity.
Most of my friends at the time when I was in college
Were the kind of folks who liked going outside. We liked going on
canoe and kayak trips, hiking trips, that kind of thing.
This is one of the few things I knew about myself at this early point in college
which is that I enjoyed being outside.
I took my first geology course, there were field trips involved
and that was interesting and exciting and
the fact that I could blend school with being outside was
a really powerful idea.
And then as I continued to take more and more courses I discovered that
there were all these different aspects of geology that I was
curious about but that I could also use in a professional sence.
One of the things that makes the earth sciences unique
is that element of field work that's incorporated within the science that we do.
There are few other disciplines that are out there
where you really need to get outside and make original observations.
But that element of actually being outside and doing
science and combining physics, chemistry, and biology to try and understand the natural world.
That's something that's really unique that haven't really seen in many other
kinds of disciplines. And it really is what makes it a lot of fun for a lot of us too.
 
