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On Friday the 24th of October I handed in my MSc thesis, the final title of which, was:
Tracing the origins of refractory inclusions – the Solar System’s oldest solids – a petrographic, geochemical and 26Al-26Mg dating study of CV and CK refractory inclusions
…which I’m sure you’ll agree is a horrendously long title, but does describe what the thesis was about. In short, rocks from space, what they’re made of and their relative age. I’m pretty happy with it, even though there were a few last minute things I may have liked to have been a little less rushed. But I’m just happy it’s done.
What that means is I’m now out of school for the first time in almost 6 years. It also means I’m ready to start my career as an actual geologist. As Murphy or Fail Blog would dictate, I’m entering the industry at the exact time when the market has decided to implode. But far be it from me to give up in the face of other people’s problems, so on Monday I’m flying from the relative safety of my island archipelago to the Australian continent – where everything is poisonous.
It’ll be Perth to start with, but depending on the jobs, I could realistically end up anywhere on the Australian continent. I’m a little worried as I had a call today from a recruiter that’s been looking out for jobs for me. Looks like geo grads aren’t in as high demand as they were mere months ago, so it’s going to be tough. But that’s part of the adventure, right?
In a geological context, I’m going from incredibly young geology (remember I study the oldest of the old rocks), with 200 Myr old greywacke basement overlain with loess from the last glacial maximum, to rocks which are commonly 500 million to 4 billion years old:
Image from Geoscience Australia. And I’m not too confident of the upper limit of the Archean basement in this image – since that’d imply Australia formed just 7.2 million years after CAIs. Which it most certainly did not.
That kind of age jump is incredibly cool, as I really like old rocks. So even as I’m stumbling around the streets of Perth, jobless, penniless and desheveled, I can take comfort in knowing there’s some interesting geology around, underwhich I may be able to shelter until morning. (note: that scenario probably won’t play out).
In the mean time, I’ve got posts to write and my life to pack up. If anyone out there has advice on the Aussie mining industry, it’d be awesome if you let me know in the comments below. Enormous life changing events, here I come.
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congrats on finishing! … Lab Lemming works in the Australia mining industry, he might have some useful info.
Yes, congratulations! I enjoyed your post, too. Good luck on the job thing – I don’t know much about the Australian situation, so can’t help there.
Congratulations!
Congratulations, and good luck! I know remarkably little about the mining industry in Australia, considering that much of the rest of my department does ore deposits. I’ve picked up a little from department seminars, but only from the perspective of what sorts of things graduate students do for industry, not which companies want employees as opposed to students doing research.
Not that you want to think about your thesis anymore, but any plans to summarize it for the geoblogosphere? … especially for po-dunk sed geologists like me who don’t even know what CV and CK refractory inclusions are.
Brian: Yep, I’ll be doing that sometime this week. It’ll obviously take me a wee while : )