Becoming a Geographer

The author&s;s first course in Physical Geography in college helped her make sense of place, tying the Pleistocene glaciations and location of the terminal moraine to her observations of large boulders near her childhood home in northern New Jersey. During her college years at Rutgers, she pursued varied work opportunities, went to two AAG meetings, co-formed the campus chapter of Gamma Theta Upsilon, the geography honor society, and pursued other avenues for leadership. Key faculty at Rutgers were supportive in charting her course to graduate school at Louisiana State University, during which she was employed full-time at the Louisiana Geological Survey during most of her graduate program. Field excursions and travel fortified her interests in geomorphology and geography. Following completion of her Ph.D. in 1990, she began a long career at the University of Florida, where she became the first tenured woman faculty member in the department. After a long period of intensive caregiving responsibilities, she spent over a decade involved in journal editing and continued work focused on disturbed large rivers and anthropogenic geomorphology.