News Highlights

  1. New division officers elected
  2. How can G&S Division better help you?

HELP WANTED

Success Stories

We need our members to send us stories (with photos) about your successes in using geology to serve society. Everything helps! Are you working with volunteer groups? Perhaps you testified at a government hearing, helped with a local zoning board, or helped educate your community about how geoscience issues? G&S Division wants to start helping educate folks about what we do. To do that, we need your stories.

Please contact us to share your tales. We’ll be sure to get them into the newsletter, and onto our new website.

Blogs, Tweets, Letters, Editorials, Press Articles, and Public Lectures

We want to start helping our members to communicate with the public. To do that, we want to help link up folks who use social media and facilitate sharing of the content we develop for lectures, articles, letters to the editor, and so forth. We are getting to work on a new website, and want to include a feature where we can share our work with each other to form a G&S Division Community of Practice. Please send us copies of things that you’d like to share with the GSA community.

Please contact us to share your ideas. We’ll work these things into our new website.


Best Student Paper Award

We need volunteers to help judge the student paper award! This award recognizes student achievement in the field of Geology & Society, and comes with a cash prize. The winner is selected from among the students who give oral presentations at technical sessions hosted or co-hosted by G&S Division. Please help promote scholarship and encourage students by volunteering to judge.

Drop by the G&S Division Booth at the Annual Meeting to learn how you can help.

How can G&S Division better help you?

G&S Division is making a concerted effort to provide greater support and service to our members. We’ve historically done this by arranging events and technical sessions at the annual meeting, providing a newsletter, and arranging for distinguished speakers and student awards. These efforts have built a stable base of about 300-350 members, but we have not yet had the impact we’d like to have within GSA or society at-large. We want to do better, and are asking for your advice and advocacy.

G&S Division’s management board is trying a few new things this year. First, and most importantly, we are making a commitment to have a vibrant and up-to-date website that provides an interactive platform for our members to share news about their concerns and successes. We’d also like it to provide material to help you advance your careers and information hat you can use to help put geoscience to work serving society. We’re working with GSA to transition to a new web support system, and our soon-to-be past chair Craig Cooper is committed to making this a vibrant site. So, please check in regularly and help us to continually improve the website.

Second, we’re trying to build a stronger presence at section meetings. These meetings reach a different population of GSA members, and have a stronger tie to local regions. These provide new opportunities to put geology to work serving our regions, and provide GSA members with additional opportunities for career and personal growth. Third, we’re trying to work more closely with other divisions to identify interdisciplinary “hot topics”, where G&S can help bring together disparate fields of geologic study to focus on an important societal problem.

This mission is larger than what the management board can do on its own. We need more engagement from the membership, more ideas for “hot topics” for technical sessions at sectional meetings and the annual meeting, and more people standing up to organize sessions and share success stories.

We also need you to provide ideas for how G&S Division could provide greater service, and volunteers to help make that happen. The new website will be a start, but it is only one small step on a longer journey. Please “grab a friend”, and join in this effort.

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