For one university department, field trips are essential. NIU’s geology department participates in field trips as a way for students to experience the field as a laboratory.

Although there are a lot of things students do in laboratories, the most important thing the department can do is put students in the field, which is the geologist’s laboratory, said Jonathan Berg, chair of geology and environmental geoscience.

“First, let me say that there probably is no other department at any university where field trips are more essential than for a geoscience department,” Berg said. “Almost every area of geoscience involves the study of rocks, land forms or earth processes that in whole, or in part, must be studied in the field.”

Starved Rock State Park, local gravel and limestone quarries and Lake Michigan’s shoreline are just some of the places students go to study geology outside the classroom.

All 300-level courses in the undergraduate major go on field trips, and about half of all 400-level elective courses and graduate courses have field trips.

The department also requires every geology major to take a six-week summer field camp course,where students spend three weeks in the Black Hills of South Dakota and three weeks in the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming. Environmental geoscience majors take a four-week field camp, where they spend two weeks near Bloomington and two weeks near DeKalb.

Most classes have lab fees that pay for most of the transportation and expenses, but it’s common to have students pay for their own food on the trip, Berg said. Students usually stay at campgrounds during these excursions, but if they have to stay at a hotel, they may have to pay for part of the room, he said.

David Keating, a geology graduate student, has been to Starved Rock State Park as well as Utah and New Mexico on geology field trips.

“Geology, probably more than any other science, or discipline for that matter, is better exemplified by examples in the field than a textbook,” Keating said. “The field observation from one field trip in geology is in my estimation worth the equivalent of a month in class, but there is no comparison.”

Mark Fischer, a professor and undergraduate adviser in geology, typically takes students on two to three field trips per year. This year, Fischer will take roughly five trips that vary from a single day to an entire week.

Field trips are a valuable part of each student’s experience, Fischer said.

“It is one thing to see pictures or read about rocks, volcanoes, the Grand Canyon and a myriad of other geological features and processes we all see or hear about every day,” Fischer said. “But, it is quite another thing to stand on a glacier, to peer into the Grand Canyon or down from atop a high mountain and to experience the power, beauty, complexity and history contained in each of them.”

Fischer has lead field trips to Wyoming, South Dakota and various parts of the southwest to supplement the lectures he has taught.

said when geology students get into the field, they connect firsthand with the things they are studying and gain a new appreciation for them.

“People probably don’t realize how much bonding and camaraderie can develop among students and between students and faculty on field trips,” Berg said. “It is a great opportunity for students and faculty to get to know each other as well as seeing, measuring and understanding rocks, land forms and processes in the field are essential skills for a geoscientist.”