Maggie here-
A couple of weekends ago I was able to tag along to a very special geology event-Geoconclave. Geoconclave is a competition in Tennessee for undergraduate geology majors from schools in Tennessee and nearby in the surrounding states. Each school participating brings a team of students to compete in various events and camp out with other geology nerds. As a graduate student there, I was able to help out our team (cooking, cleaning up, making sure people got to their competition sites, etc.) as well as help out the faculty members in charge of the weekend as a whole and helped with specific competitions. Our first night there was very reminiscent of being at camp for the first night-we got to meet students from the other schools, eat dinner, and play card games all night. Most of us got to bed pretty early because we needed to be up early the next day to start the conclave fun!
The next morning all of the competitions started. The first half of the day was spent doing written competitions in hydrogeology, pace and compass, maps, rock identification, mineral identification, and fossil identification. These written competitions were set up as 30 minute tests, some were more hands-on than others, that one student from each school participated in. Every team was awarded points towards the overall competition based on how they placed in each individual event.
During the afternoon we had our fun field events-the rock hammer throw and the geode roll! These were separated by hammer throw for distance and accuracy, and geode roll for distance and accuracy. It was interesting to see the different techniques that everyone had for throwing hammers and rolling the geode. You wouldn’t think that there would be a strategy or technique for these things, but there certainly is! It was fun to sit with the team from University of Tennessee and hear them discuss and strategize how to throw each object for each event. These events were definitely some of the most fun and it was great to be able to cheer on other teams and laugh along with them as we threw hammers and geodes.
After dinner, all of the teams competed in the rock bowl–a geology-based quiz game! We played bracket elimination style and the questions alternated between questions that would be fair game in any intro geology class all the way up to questions that are typical to ask senior geology students. This was the hardest event (in my opinion!) for students to sit through because the audience had to be silent, no matter how badly we wanted to answer questions! At the end of rock bowl, the winners of Geoconclave and rock bowl were announced, but, the best part was after cleaning up many students went and hung out around a campfire-the competition was fun but at the end of the day, we had more fun hanging out with other young geologists than competing with them.
By the time that we got up and started making breakfast on Sunday morning, most of the other teams had left already (they had much longer drives that we did!) and it was nice to have our quiet breakfast before the deep cleaning of the camp kitchen started. After camp was cleaned up, several of us went to go look at the waterfall in the state park in which we were camping. It was such a nice way to end the weekend!
Being able to experience Geoconclave as a grad student made me really appreciate the work that goes into hosting an event like this, but also made me really jealous that we didn’t have something like this where I did my undergrad. It is such a fun way for students who love geology to practice their skills, but also to meet other geologists around the state. I know I speak for many people on UT’s team when I say that I can’t wait for next year!