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AWG Awards
AWG Outstanding Educator Awards - Past Recipients
Suzanne O'Connell - 2000 AWG Outstanding Educator
Dr. Suzanne O'Connell, Associate Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT, is the recipient of the AWG Foundation Outstanding Educator Award for 2000. The award will be presented at the annual AWG breakfast on Tuesday, 14 November 2000 during the Geological Society of America convention in Reno, NV.
At Wesleyan University, one of the top liberal arts colleges in the country, Dr. O'Connell shares her passion for geosciences with her students by using innovative classroom techniques and exposing them to research. She routinely takes her Oceanography classes of 80 students into the field, has created an outstanding website for them, and enhances the courses by holding "video nights" for the students throughout the semester. She has gone out of her way to create research opportunities for her students, including undergraduates, through her extensive connections at other labs. Her students have gone on to high achievement in numerous graduate programs. Several have followed her example by participating in the Ocean Drilling Program (ODP), and two have received coveted ODP Graduate Fellowships. O'Connell has touched many lives with her enthusiasm and personal mentoring and has served as an outstanding role model for women in science throughout her already distinguished career.
An accomplished sedimentologist specializing in deep sea sedimentation, Dr. O'Connell has authored or co-authored over 60 refereed publications and edited the JOIDES Journal, as well as Ocean Drilling Project (ODP) Initial Reports and Scientific Results. Her 20-plus years of oceanographic experience include several Deep Sea Drilling Project/Ocean Drilling Program cruises where she served as a staff scientist and the ODP staff representative. She also spent one year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on a National Science Foundation Visiting Professorship for Women.
Dr. O'Connell has been an AWG member since the mid-1980s, including eight years of service on the Association Board of Directors. She joined AWG in Texas, and was Vice-President and Newsletter Co-editor of the Texas Lone Star Chapter. She is also a member of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, American Geophysical Union, Geological Society of America,
International Association of Sedimentologists, National Association of Geology Teachers, Sigma Xi, Society for Sedimentary Geology, and Council on Undergraduate Research.
Recently, Wesleyan University generously granted Dr. O'Connell a two-year leave of absence to pursue a slightly different path: giving something back to her community as Director of the new Center for Interdisciplinary Science at Trinity College in Hartford, CT. At the center, she will develop an Environmental Science Program, interdisciplinary facilities such as a field station, and additional community outreach initiatives. She is most excited about her new role as liaison between Trinity College and the Greater Hartford Academy of Math and Science. This academy is part of The Learning Corridor, a $175 million effort to revitalize downtown Hartford, a city with a 36% poverty rate and a large minority population. This revolutionary education complex includes elementary Montessori school and education through high school, Boys and Girls Clubs, a family center for education and a family medical facility. Dr. O'Connell will share her enormous enthusiasm for science and learning, involving students from Trinity and the Academy together in projects such as a water quality and revitalization program for the Park River.
Suzanne O'Connell worked her way through Oberlin College, obtaining undergraduate degrees in biology and geology. She earned her Master's degree in geology from the State University of New York at Albany with a thesis that required field work in the ophiolite belt of soggy Newfoundland: "Geology of the Mafic/Ultramafic Transition, Table Mountain, Newfoundland."
In 1986, she completed her PhD on modern submarine depositional and distributary systems from Columbia University. Her doctoral dissertation work on the Valencia Valley and Deep Sea Fan in the northwestern Mediterranean attracted notable attention, particularly from those who believe that this may have been the conduit through which the Mediterranean was refilled after it dried up during the late Miocene.
Originally from Monterey, CT, Dr. O'Connell is married to Thomas Christopher, a freelance writer who currently writes about gardens for Martha Stewart. They live in Middletown, CT, with their son Matthew, age 10, who is learning to play the bagpipes with his mom.
Working with Dr. Suzanne O'Connell has been described by her former students as a "phenomenal experience." Please join us at the AWG breakfast on November 14 to honor this truly outstanding educator and inspirational woman.
-Carolyn Rindosh Miller, Chair
Suzanne O'Connell's Acceptance Speech
[The following is Suzanne O'Connell's acceptance speech upon receiving the 2000 AWG Outstanding Educator Award at the AWG Breakfast on 14 November 2000 at the Geological Society of America meeting in Reno, NV.]
This breakfast, the AWG breakfast, has always been my favorite event at GSA. I don't think I've ever missed one, and usually I buy two or three tickets and bring (force or cajole) someone who has never been to one to accompany me. This event is to be shared. Where else in this business do you have the opportunity to look forward to getting up so early and meeting with many other fabulous women and select men. I love this event.
But-I never expected to be standing here. In fact, I don't know how it could have happened. But then, as we've seen in the last week, some pretty unusual things can happen. I am overwhelmed. Thank you so much.
Thanks to AWG: in so many ways this organization has been critical to sustaining me in my professional development. It's been a refuge. Here is an organization
*where we share and support each other,
*where we provide opportunities for each other, and
*where we develop wonderful friendships.
My feelings toward AWG make this honor all the more wonderful.
Thanks to my family, husband and son, the two men I share my life with. They endured long and short absences as I've pursued this exciting career and supported me with love and encouragement.
Thanks to my parents and sisters. They have been so supportive and for so long. I'll say more about them later.
Thanks to my friends-so many of you are here. We've shared so many trials and joys and have such great times ahead of us. I am really blessed.
Thanks to my students, especially my Wesleyan students. They've done a lot to educate me. I have had the privilege of working with some of the finest minds and most incredible students. For an educator there could be no greater gift.
Thanks to my colleagues at Wesleyan and throughout the earth sciences. And thanks to my professors, at Oberlin, at SUNY-Albany and at Columbia. How could one person be so fortunate.
I'd also like to take this opportunity, though, to discuss some of the issues which still face women in the geosciences. Because there are issues we still face and which we'll address more effectively together. Last year Pam Hallock-Muller discussed her salary discrimination case against her university. How could that be in 1999? Well, it turns out that's not an isolated case and in academia salaries are not the only issue. There's the issue of hiring- who gets hired and who doesn't.
There's the issue of tenure. How could outstanding scientists and educators, people such as Maureen Raymo at MIT, Michele Komitz at UT or Lois Ongley at Bates, not get tenure? AWG is an important forum for us to help each other and keep these issues alive. There's a lot more ground to cover.
Personally, however, I'm not confronted with any particular burning issue right now, and so, before coming here this morning, I was wondering what I should say. I went to the book store hoping to find some inspiration. What I found was a book of Zen philosophy. It opened to "Sand in the eyes, Clay in the mouth." Appropriate maybe, but not quite what I had in mind. But I also found this other book, Stumbling Toward Enlightenment. That's more my style.
I did stumble into geology and have been reaping the rewards ever since. Who ever thought you could get paid to travel around the world with friends to look at and think about mud and rocks?
Preparing this talk gave me a chance to think about my professional life and how it got put together. I'm always so curious to know how someone got to where they are. How did they assemble the pieces of their lives? What rollercoasters did they ride? In my recent musings about this, two themes have kept recurring;
*how much I have been supported by women and
*the serendipity of our lives.
I've reflected about the people who have influenced me-in big ways and small ways -and most of them probably have no idea how important they were. Many were short and chance encounters. At the time, I had no idea either of how important these encounters were. Yet, here I am receiving this award. Maybe you, too, have no idea how important and successful you are.
So here are the musings:
- I think one of the first professional women who influenced me was a physician. I was about 10 and visiting my grandmother at Columbia Point in Boston. Somehow, I fell off a fence and was taken to Boston City Hospital. Lying for hours in a large green room, I saw many incredible sights, but I won't describe them, as this is a breakfast meeting. Besides, what amazed me most at the time was that the person who treated me was a woman. A woman doctor! That was a revelation. At that time, I was planning to be a nun, but now it occurred to me that maybe I could be a doctor. Of course, being 10, I actually decided to be both. As you can see, I didn't pursue either career. And I thank god for that. But that woman, just by her presence, started me thinking.
Like that physician, we are all role models. You are probably introduced to non-geology friends and their children as a scientist and someone who knows about rocks. Who knows what ideas that will implant in their young heads?
- I have also been thinking about why AWG is so important to me. I have met so many outstanding women through this organization. Women have always been important in my life. First, because I grew up in a family of six girls. My grandmother also lived with us, so with my mother that made eight females at the dinner table. When I mention this, some people wonder how all those women living together managed about the shower and the phone, about how we managed to get along. Well, this was rural New England and we didn't have a shower- I think they had those in California. We had a party telephone line and so did everyone else I knew. Our ring was one long and two short. No one was allowed to spend much time on the phone-plus someone else was probably listening in. This was a small town. So those were not issues.
And we all got along. I don't quite understand this. I think my mother is to thank for that, she fostered a strong team spirit in us. Possibly because things were pretty tough economically, so we all had to work hard and work together-and we still do. But to make this work there were all kinds of things that we couldn't say-and still don't. The rule was to "just ignore it," or "offer it up." That part I don't think is so good.
Nevertheless our support for each other continues. Even directly-one of my sisters was my summer field assistant when I was mapping in Newfoundland. Her boyfriend, who was a high school typing teacher, typed my master's thesis. Later, when I was finishing my Ph.D. dissertation, my sisters again came to my aid. One helped with drafting and another with some of my grain size analyses. It was a family affair. My one sister had switched boyfriends by then, so it was fortunate that we had access to word processors. It is a remarkable family to have come from. I think coming from such a family that I naturally gravitate towards other women and to the sharing and supporting environment we can create for each other.
- Then there's this wonderful field of earth science of which we are all part. How did I find it? As an undergraduate, I was a biology major. I loved the out-of-doors and even though, as a kid, I collected rocks and played in gravel pits, it never occurred to me that you could actually make a living doing geology.
In my high school, only the dummies took earth science. I was too good for that. Or so I thought. Besides, my 8th grade earth science class was a disaster. My teacher, Mr. Chamberlain, like many people, found out early on that I blushed easily. Embarrassingly easily. Whether this was his goal or not, I spent a large portion of every class with a beet red face and the accompanying horrible prickly sensation. That's all I remember, and I remember it very well, about that earth science class.
So I was a biology major. Then one summer I served as a TA in a summer field biology course at a small college in Maine; that college doesn't even exist anymore. The course turned out to be about one third botany, one third zoology and one third earth science. It was an incredible course. After two weeks in the class room, we spent a full week in four different environments. One of them was in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. The earth science teacher, who was a woman, told me how mountains were once part of the ocean. As my son would say-Yeah, right! I never saw her or spoke to her again after that summer.
Nevertheless, always the skeptic, I had to take a geology course when I returned to college in the fall. That was about 1971. What a time to be thinking about oceans and mountains! I remember my professors going off to GSA. They were also outstanding educators. They wanted us to know about the exciting developments taking place in geology. They invited people like Kevin Burke, John Dewey, Peter Molar and. of course, Tanya Atwater to speak on campus. These speakers were spreading the word about geology and the lives that geologists can live. What rich lives. John Dewey at that time was mapping ophiolites, those bits of ocean floor that get caught up in mountain belts, in Newfoundland. When I went to grad school, that's where I went.
Also in that undergraduate geology department was a woman, Helen Forman; her late husband had been chair of the department many years earlier. Although I don't think I ever spoke to her and only saw her once or twice, my professors spoke of her with a sort of hushed reverence-she had been out on the Glomar Challenger! That was special. That was something I wanted to do. It's something I did do. Another joy in my life.
- I don't think we can always know how we are influencing others. But I do think that we, as women geoscientists, help every young girl to know that she has wider career options. As we combine work and family, we send the message that it can be done. Maybe not the way our mothers or sisters or even friends did it or do it. We each find our own way, but we do it. And as we do, it becomes more possible for everyone. As we create opportunities for ourselves, as we follow our dreams, we're also helping others-our sisters, our friends, our students, our children-to create them, too. It's often not easy, but it is exciting.
Thank you all for this award. I cannot imagine a higher honor.
-Suzanne O'Connell, 2000 AWG Outstanding Educator Award Recipient
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