Prior to my senior year of high school, I had put no thought into what my academic goals were. That final year of high school however, I took an AP Environmental Science course and found myself intrigued by the workings of the Earth. I decided midway through the year that I wanted to major in an Earth science related field and my interests in math and physics led me to Geophysics, a very niche major that Berkeley thankfully had.

                  By the end of my freshman year of college, I had finished nearly all of my major’s lower division requirements and began to take my upper division courses as a sophomore. I was introduced to some basic computer programming and took a few advanced courses that with smaller class sizes that allowed me to begin to form relationships with my professors. I had the opportunity to begin a research project for a professor looking at the relationship between peak ground acceleration and coseismic water level rise at a site in New Zealand that experienced earthquake induced liquefaction in an attempt to establish some kind of peak ground acceleration threshold for liquefaction. This project is ongoing and I hope to continue it throughout my junior year. I also joined the Geological Association at Berkeley (GAB) which has become a very important part of my life. GAB is the largest club in my department (Earth and Planetary Sciences) and I’ve made numerous good friends along with professional connections through my membership. Next year, I will likely be elected vice president of the club and will have the responsibility of running the club my senior year as president. I also began to take some engineering coursework this past year and enjoyed it enough to decide to pursue a minor in geotechnical engineering.

                   This summer, as a rising junior, I had the opportunity to participate in an REU program for ocean, marine, and polar sciences at Elizabeth City State University in North Carolina. Another student and I were given a project, sponsored by a research group at Penn State, involving the analysis of data sets from the Greenland ice sheet in an attempt to quantify the mass influx rate along the shear margins of the Northeast Greenland Ice Stream. We spent a week at Penn State learning how to use software and access datasets before returning to Elizabeth City to complete our project. This project was my first full time experience with research and it was extremely interesting as well as challenging. My partner and I were forced to continually adapt our methods as well develop new ones in order to overcome the numerous complications we ran into.

                  Going forward I remain unsure of what exactly the future holds for me. As a freshman, I aspired to work in the oil and gas industry as a seismic interpreter after completing a master’s program in geophysics. I really enjoyed the engineering classes I took this past year however and have been considering obtaining a master’s in engineering instead. Either way, I hope to continue my education at a graduate school be it in engineering or geophysics.