First-Gen Geoscience
I grew up on a small sheep farm in mid Wales. My parents were a bit unconventional. My mother had left home at 15 to join the circus and had travelled all through America in the 1950’s. In amongst the stories of her adventures was a major discomfort with the segregation she had seen in the American Deep South and she installed in us a strong sense of justice. She left the circus when she met my father, who was serving in the SAS. Shortly after they married he left the army and they bought a small farm to start a new life. He wasn’t around very much during our childhood and when he was, he was generally drunk. Who knows what pain he was suffering on the inside, but he was still my hero.
I was 15 when he died and my mum asked if I wanted to carry on farming. It was a tough choice, I loved the farm, it was all I knew, but it was never going to sustain us. At school, it was looking like I might get good enough grades to go to University, nobody really knew what that meant, but it sounded like an option that should be taken if available. The only other person we knew who had been to Uni was our vet, my grades were never going to be that good, so the question was what to study?
Encouraged by my parent’s stories, I knew I wanted to travel, and I wanted adventure. I could never consider a career in an office, a farming childhood meant I needed to be out of doors and working with my hands as well as my brain. I looked at studying Forestry, I could already wield a chainsaw, but then I read a pulp fiction novel in which the protagonist was a geologist. He was mapping in British Columbia and it sounded like the sort of lifestyle I was after. I got a summer job as a teaching assistant with Robertson’s Research in Wales. We knew so little about geology that friends and families asked if I would be making jam*! The work was a bit dull, photocopying and the like, but lunchtimes and coffee breaks were littered with tales of fieldwork in North Africa and the Middle East which encouraged me further.
In August 1985, I got my A-levels and scraped into Cardiff. The Geology degree was better than I had imagined, it was both fascinating and fun. University life was a blast, I got a full grant and with £1800 per year I was richer than I could have imagined. I had never lived in a city, been for a curry or seen a band. I worked as stage crew and on the door in the University Union, more money to party and buy gear for my new found passion of climbing. My tutors were inspiring! People like Jan Alexander, Graham Williams and Rod Gayer captured my imagination and sowed the seeds for a lifelong love of sediments and structure. In the summer of my first year I was lucky enough to be a field assistant for Liz Jolley, a PhD student working in Spain. Six weeks of mapping and logging, living out of a van and soaking up culture in the Pyrenees confirmed that I had made the right choice. On the train home I knew this was it – I was going to do everything I could to make geology my life.
Along the way I also met people who loved geology, but had different aspirations. A woman who didn’t enjoy fieldwork and whose goal in life was to be a museum curator. An older man, who had retired and was simply doing the degree for fun. Lads who wanted to be accountants and actuaries (whatever that was). I was initially shocked to find out that over half the class had no aspiration to be a geologist and even among those who did, few of them wanted to spend time either abroad or in the field. Perhaps the most valuable lesson was, that while geology was a ticket to a specific lifestyle for me, it is open to anyone and there is a huge range of options afterwards both within the subject and beyond.
Prof. John Howell is Chair in Virtual Geoscience at the University of Aberdeen, UK
*[those who like their preserves will know Robertsons is also the name of a well-known jam-making company!]