PITTSBURGH (PTTP) – Audrey Kettelberger is a University of Pittsburgh Alumnus (2022) who has been selected for a national government fellowship with the United States Geological Survey. She will be analyzing data to understand the past of environments, and even look into their future.
Kettelberger cites the large variety of available classes as one of the most important parts of her Pitt experience. She came to the school undecided but fell in love with her introductory geology course. She was nominated to apply for the national government fellowship by a Pitt professor.
A class she took at Pitt, Paleo Climatology, is now directly translating to the work she will be doing at the fellowship. The work entails looking at Alaskan lake cores, long tubes of soil samples sliced into thin intervals to study change to the earth over time. She will be working in a lab analyzing the sediment to examine for properties such as grain size, and the presence of fossils or plant matter.
Using these cores makes it possible not only to make inferences about past climates but predict future ones as our climate continues to change. A word of advice she’d give to future Pitt students is that “it all comes back to the basics.” Your introductory courses are as vital as the advanced ones. She also emphasized the value of taking advantage of Pitt’s research opportunities and for geology students, choosing a field camp that they will utilize in the future.