I am a fourth-year senior in the Department of Geological Sciences, a department that despite its prolific publication record and contributions to scholarship is now facing the ax. If the state revenues are as dire as predicted, the college will require that we cut all the lab managers, nontenured faculty and an office worker (we only have three). In simple terms, this means that for every $9 cut from the budget, one dollar comes directly from geology.
When I asked why we were asked to give up so much, I was told it's because we don't have enough Ph.D. or undergraduate students to justify our funding. Though our major is small, it can't be said that we don't generate enough credit hours. Half of all students who attend UF will take a geology class. We have twice the number of majors as astronomy and nearly as many Ph.D. candidates.
One of the reasons for the lack of Ph.D. students comes from the success of geologists in the marketplace. M.S. And B.S. students find it easy to obtain high-paying jobs. Just last year, my friend Jesse graduated from UF with a B.A. and was immediately hired by Schlumberger (a major player in the petroleum industry) and is grossing more than $50,000 a year.
This would not have been possible without the faculty and staff the dean wants to cut.
Without a doubt, the greatest tragedy is the loss of the young, nontenured professors, whose passion and enthusiasm have inspired me and all of my peers. I had never given any thought to majoring in geology until Matt Smith took a personal interest in my education. Every year, another lecturer/researcher, Jim Vogl, leads students across the country, at great personal sacrifice, to teach lessons in the field. I fell in love with geology, not to mention The Gator Nation, on one such trip to North Carolina where we climbed mountains to search for rubies. Now in my senior year I work for Kyoungwon "Kyle" Min, a dedicated teacher and fruitful researcher, on uranium/thorium decay. I must admit, geology is not a "sexy" science. A rock is a rock. It was yesterday, and it will be tomorrow. But it is those rocks that contain the oil we rely on, the diamonds we covet and the metals we will use to manufacture our future.
We accept the fact of climate change because rocks record the climate of ages past, and geologists read that record.
Every top-10 research university has a geology department, and if UF wants to remain Florida's flagship university and relevant in today's changing world, it needs its geologists.
