Paleontology Interview: Girls In Stem Blog

[mikecable]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/amy-atwater/paleontology-interview-ge_b_4682864.html

Poor/Lucky Kate was assigned to work together with Amy as a mentor/mentee pair through the Huffington Post's Girls in STEM blog where they both write about their experiences as female paleontologists, student and professional. Amy and Kate met up this year at the annual Geological Society of America's (GSA) meeting in Denver, CO. Below is the result: a glimpse into Kate Zeigler's life as a badass lady paleontologist/geologist (Slow Loris Rarely Included).

Nothing sexier than a girl in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math). I didn't have many female role models in STEM as a K-12 student. But I will alway remember my high school physics teacher. She was only five or six years older than I was, and so I must confess that I was as interested in her physical anatomy as much as I was in lectures on physics.

But I took physics as a sophomore, and most of the class had not yet taken trigonometry. Ms. Ivy told us she would teach us trig in a week. And she did.

​I still remember to this day her mnemonic--Some Old Hippie Came Around Here Tripping On Acid--sine=opposite/hypotenuse, cosine=adjacent/hypotenuse, tangent=opposite/adjacent. I don't use trig often, but when I do I can still do so with pencil and paper.

Girls can rock science. I try to teach that every day.

[Mediospirifer]

Kudos for Mrs. Ivy, and well done to you for encouraging the girls! This program sounds great--I would have jumped at the chance to get into this when I was a student.

When I was little, my dad encouraged my interest in science (he was a physics grad student at the time), and told me never to accept anyone's declaration that I couldn't do something because I was a girl. He wasn't just talking about science, either--he did his own auto mechanics and firewood gathering, and pushed me to learn at least the basics of both. Mom, being a tomboy herself, completely backed that up, and fostered an interest in biology and wildlife. My Mom was a woman who could take the phrase "Mommy! Look what I found!", accompanied by a squirming snake in her 5-year-old daughter's hands, and respond with "Oh! What a pretty snake! Let's look him up in the field guide!" She also would bring science experiments into my school and show my class some neat things, like what kinds of single-celled critters live in pond scum. I don't know how many of my classmates were sparked into a lifelong interest, but I do know that most of them liked her visits.

Most of my high school and college math and computer programming teachers were women. Other than that, my STEM-field teachers were all men. I was good at most of those classes, and my teachers universally pushed me to be better.