undergraduate research took this aggie everywhere from the eagle ford shale to marsfour undergraduate research projects helped juan acevedo prepare for an impactful careerapr 30 2018senior geophysics major juan acevedo had a unique experience during his time at texas a&m university: he participated in not one or two but four separate undergraduate research projects originally from colombia acevedo and his family moved to the united states about ten years ago and because both of his parents are geologists juan grew up around the geosciences ive always liked going out and learning about how mountains were formed and what makes up the rocks he said all it took was a visit to the texas a&m campus when he was in high school to convince acevedo to decide to bring his passion for geology to aggieland i came to one of the football games with my best friend and his sister who was an aggie geology alumni and she brought us in and i just loved it as soon as i came here acevedo said i fell in love and i decided this is where i wanted to go to school his undergraduate career would turn out to cover a lot of ground and acevedo believes his research experiences outside the classroom equipped him with the skills needed to excel in his field the texas a&m college of geosciences and the department of geology and geophysics prioritize high-impact student experiences such as undergraduate researchjuan acevedo '18 (photo by chris mouchyn)acevedo conducting field work (photo courtesy of acevedo)studying the eagle ford shale acevedos first research experience at texas a&m was a summer research project with dr juan carlos laya assistant professor in the department of geology and geophysics we studied foraminifera along the eagle ford shale he said we were studying how they evolved basically through the cretaceous cenomanian-turonian boundaries because there was a lot of ash bed deposition during that time so we were seeing if the ash bed had any sort of correlation to more abundance in the foraminifera population in the eagle ford geology and geophysics department head dr mike pope supervised his second project it was also on the eagle ford shale but i was doing a geochemical analysis of the core so i used an x-ray florescence device which is kind of like a little gun and it would just shoot x-rays into the rock and it would show me exactly what the geochemistry was acevedo said we did this to see how the chemistry changed throughout the deposition of the eagle ford shale geology research on mars and geophysical studies of alaska taking a much broader scope on his third project acevedo and dr ryan ewing associate professor in the department of geology and geophysics researched sedimentary dunes in the north pole of mars i was just very interested in planetary geosciences so i went and i sought him out and i asked him if there was any sort of work he had for me he said he brought up this project that was basically tracking the dunes on the north pole of mars and how they were moving through a span of four earth years it was really fun! acevedos fourth project was a summer 2017 internship with a seismological research company iris and the missouri university of science and technology in rolla missouri all of the (iris) interns got sent out to different universities acevedo said our projects were seismologically based and focused on the work that each of the professors had we then presented our work at the american geophysical union (agu) conference in new orleans his resulting agu poster was titled seismic anisotropy beneath alaska constrained by shear wave splitting analysis i learned a lot throughout that project he said especially because it was more focused on the research i was going eight to five everyday just working on my research so it really got me into that mentality of what it is like to be a researcher that project was more geophysics-intense all of the other ones were geology basedacevedo with his research poster at agu 2017 (photo courtesy of acevedo)moving forward after graduation after graduating from texas a&m this month acevedo will begin graduate school at the university of texas at austin where hell be researching groundwater resources and groundwater policy hes looking forward to building on the experience he gained in aggieland the professors there thought that all of my experience as an undergraduate really helped me get that position as a graduate student because it put me out there acevedo said i was doing work; i was going above and beyond what was expected i really enjoyed my time here and im very happy for this future opportunity he recommends undergraduate research and thinks that its a component of his education that set him apart from other students even if youre not planning on going to graduate school or getting a doctorate or anything like that you should still experience that research process of having a question and not knowing how to solve it then going through the literature talking to advisors talking to graduate students who are maybe working on this and putting out your own work doing the scientific process and presenting that research is very important his time at texas a&m was also positively shaped by his participation in the colombian student association texas a&m quidditch team and college of geosciences exchange program with the university of leicester in the spring of 2016 he said though acevedo is leaving aggieland he says that hell miss the community itself; the school is very close-knit i like the feeling of knowing that everybody here is willing to do anything for everybody else my brother is studying geology and i feel like he and i and everybody else in the geology and geosciences community we all kind of know each other we all have our own little tight-knit group of people were the smallest college at this school so its something to be proud of by catherine mccarthy '19