Back when I was at university studying palaeontology, while quaffing our numerous cups of coffee during the day, I and a colleague used to muse about the ideal palaeontological job we wanted, and it usually came down to working at the Bureau of Mineral Resources, Geology and Geophysics (BMR) in Canberra. We didn’t think it would ever happen, and that we would initially be the most highly qualified ‘check-out chicks’ in a local supermarket.
A survey conducted by the science journal Nature has found that unsolicited applications — commonly known as cold e-mails — can be a surprisingly powerful tool for landing a job in science. According a survey, 43% of laboratory leaders and principal investigators (PIs) think that cold e-mails are an effective way for candidates to get noticed, with 57% saying they “tend to” or “always” respond1. After reading this article, I realised that is effectively what I had done, but in the days of snail-mail.
My first professional job out of university was as a regional mapping geologist working at the Alice Springs office of the Northern Territory Geological Survey (NTGS). The project with which I was involved was mapping sedimentary rocks of the Georgina Basin on the Huckitta 1:250,000 sheet. The Georgina Basin is a huge basin, and is almost the size of Germany, at 330,000 square km. It extends from near Tennant Creek in the centre of the Northern Territory across nearly to Mount Isa in western Queensland and extends about 800 km from north to south2.
Many of the rocks we were mapping were Cambrian marine limestones, shales and mudstones, and were replete with fossils of trilobites, agnostids, brachiopods and molluscs. During one field trip, I found quite a few of these, and when I got back to town, I started to hunt around the published literature to see if I could work out what they were, and their significance. The NTGS library had some of the extensive work on the Georgina Basin published by the BMR, but that only extended to the Queensland border; there was almost nothing from the Queensland side, which is where most of the fossils studied in BMR publications had been obtained. So, in 1981, I wrote a letter to John Shergold explaining the lack of publications from the Queensland side, and asking if I could obtain copies of the assorted BMR Bulletins that he and Armin Öpik has written on Cambrian trilobites and agnostids. He sent them all to me soon after, and I pored over them in the following months. All of these publications are now online as ‘legacy publications’, having been scanned by Geoscience Australia (the successor organisation to BMR) a decade or two ago3.
Some time later, in the first half of 1982, John Shergold was assisting Bruce Runnegar (University of California, Los Angeles) in obtaining middle Cambrian mollusc fossils, and they were both coming to Alice Springs to look at the succession east of Alice Springs in Ross River Gorge. I begged the senior geologist in Alice Springs to allow me to go out in the field with them, to which he acquiesced. We swagged out in the bed of Ross River, near the Giles Creek Dolostone outcrop, whence the molluscs came. While sitting around the campfire that night, John Shergold asked me: ‘if you got the offer of a job in Canberra would you accept it?’ I replied wholeheartedly ‘Of course!’ A couple of months later, they flew me down for an interview, and in October 1982, I started work at BMR. The dream had become reality.
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