During my time at PSU, I was an active member of the Penn State chapter of the Association for Women Geoscientists (AWG), an impactful graduate student organization in the Geosciences department. AWG does fundraising for our undergraduate field camp scholarship, provides networking and social events, discusses important issues in geoscience, leads community outreach, and mentors undergraduate students. Being involved in leadership as a past co-president (2019-2020), outreach coordinator (2020-2021; 2018-2019), and as a undergraduate mentor (2017-2020) was very rewarding. Here, I have highlighted a few of the key outreach experiences I organized at PSU through AWG.
In fall 2018, the Bearded Lady Project exhibit came to the Earth and Mineral Sciences Museum on the Penn State campus, and I enjoyed generating programming as an extension of my role as AWG outreach coordinator. We brought 130 middle and high school girls from 10 different counties across the state to spend the day with us and watch the BLP documentary, engage with the exhibit and the EMS collections through our activities, and learn about diversity in geosciences with a crash course in geology. For PSU students and the community, I also organized an opening reception, documentary screening, and women in STEM panel discussion when project creators Dr. Ellen Currano and Lexi Marsh were visiting campus.
I also led an AWG outreach team at the Nittany Mineralogical Society's Annual Jr. Education Day. In 2019 we shared a table on mineral fracture and cleavage utilizing specimens from the EMS Museum and taught local stratigraphy using our popular homemade collage art panels.
Another event AWG participates in annually is the WPSU Eventapalooza, where we get to interact with hundreds of local kids and lead a hands-on science education demonstration, like the Play-doh fossilization activity I organized in 2017, shown here.