For one group of URI geology students, a series of field trips led to lifelong friendships and career successes.
Almost everyone remembers the excitement of going on a field trip during elementary school—the long bus ride, your mom as a chaperone, and an eye-opening experience at a museum or historic site.
But field trips aren’t just for little kids. In fact, for one group of URI geology students, a series of field trips as part of their university coursework led to lifelong friendships and career successes.
In the early 1980s, nearly two-dozen students—almost all studying for their masters’ degrees—converged in Green Hall where the Geology Department was then located. “It was one of those situations where everybody just clicked,” said John Grant, M.S. ’86, who grew up on the shores of Lake Champlain. “We became very tight very quickly. We all had common interests and common goals.”
They also all had to go on regular field trips throughout the eastern United States and even into Canada to study coastal erosion at Cape Hatteras, to visit caves in Kentucky and West Virginia, to learn about mountain building in upstate New York, and to examine tidal beds at the Bay of Fundy, among others. “Every trip was an adventure,” said John Sullivan ’85, the lone undergraduate in the group, “and every trip was something new and exciting that you had never seen before.”
“It’s one thing to work with each other and get along, but in our case it was the depth of how we all got along,” added Grant. “We went on these 10-day field trips, and we’d come back even closer than when we left.”
John Thompson, M.S. ’87, recalls that on one trip the group stopped at a road construction site where they collected so many fossilized rocks that the van rode on its axels for the last several hundred miles back to campus. Grant’s favorite memory occurred on the long drive to Kentucky when, to stave off boredom, Thompson maintained a list of all the road kill they saw along the way. He also has fond memories of the Bay of Fundy trip when, after walking a mile on the bottom of the bay at low tide, the group dug for clams on the return trip and had a clam bake.
“Being outdoors and having fun while you’re learning—that’s what really created the bond between us,” Thompson said.
Grant, Sullivan, and Thompson all spoke enthusiastically about another member of their group, Tim Ling ’87, who, after graduation, quickly moved up the corporate ladder to become president of Unocal, the major oil and gas production company, but who died unexpectedly in 2004. According to Sullivan, Ling was gifted in the arts, athletics, and science. He started a rock band called the Geotones, regularly made entertaining movies of URI field trips, and was known to play late-night hockey games in the Green Hall auditorium.
“Tim was known especially for his great sense of humor,” Sullivan said. “He could always make everyone laugh. And he would joke with you when he was looking out for your best interest, too, like when he told me I needed a new girlfriend.”
The URI geology graduates all noted that they didn’t just bond with their fellow students; they developed close relationships with their faculty members on these field trips as well, especially Jon Boothroyd, Dan Murray, and Don Hermes.
It was Boothroyd’s research on shoreline erosion that attracted Grant to apply to URI in the first place, and it was one of Boothroyd’s other interests—mapping the surface of Mars—that led Grant to his current career.
Grant took a faculty position in Buffalo, N.Y., after leaving URI, and in 2000 he moved to the Center for Earth and Planetary Studies at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum where he is one of the scientific leaders on the Mars rover mission. “I’m one of a handful of folks responsible for leading the science team on a day-to-day basis,” he said. In this role, he determines “if we’re going to drive, where are we going to drive; if we’re going to do some imaging, what are we going to look at; and what are we going to use the arm to probe. I lead that process.”
Grant said that the day-to-day exploration of Mars is incredibly exciting, because every single day he gets to see things that have never been seen by anyone before. “The tightness of the group of people I’m working with now comes a close second to the group at URI,” he said. “The skills of the people at the Jet Propulsion Lab who built and maintain the rovers are amazing.”
Thompson’s career path followed from his interest in groundwater geology. His first job involved investigating leaking underground storage tanks; later he graduated to major cleanups at oil company terminals and refineries around the world.
Today he’s an executive at a private engineering firm, Woodard and Curran, where he continues to oversee cleanups at hazardous waste sites and the reclamation of old landfills, including the former URI landfill west of the Kingston Campus. His company also assists bottled water companies around the world in identifying underground springs and other new water sources. “You’d be amazed at how much water the local Coca Cola bottling company goes through in a day,” Thompson said. “If they tapped into the Scituate Reservoir [which provides drinking water to most of Rhode Island], it would be dry in a week.”
Sullivan took a rather different path. During his college years he began to learn about investing by studying daily stock trading data. Later he merged his early investment successes with his knowledge of geology to form an investment firm that focuses on the oil and gas industries. In 2005 he shared some of his financial success with the URI Department of Geosciences by establishing an endowment to help the department fund field trips and related activities.
“It’s clear much of my success and that of my classmates comes not from what we did as individuals, but from what we did together,” Sullivan said. “Our professors always had high expectations and demanded quality work that could only be achieved by collaborating socially and academically.”
Those collaborations continue to this day. Thompson has hosted annual reunions for the group at his home in Narragansett in recent years which upwards of 100 people have attended from around the country—URI geology alumni and their families, faculty members, and others—all of whom share a special fondness for taking road trips to look at rocks.
By Todd McLeish
Photo Courtesy of John Thompson
