Nevada State science students earn street cred
A small group of college students dressed down Friday, jeans and T-shirts, tennis shoes, baseball caps.
They didn’t bring their books, didn’t even go to their classroom.
Instead, they joined their professor, Edwin Price, in the middle of the desert.
“The classroom is mostly academics,” said Price, who teaches in the environmental and resource science program at Nevada State College.
“You can’t get a feel for what a drill rig is in the classroom like you can out here. We do a lot of field work in this class.”
The class was environmental measurement and analysis, which is about collecting various samples of stuff and figuring out whether it’s got bad things in it and what to do about that.
It’s an important field, protecting things like our groundwater from leaking gas stations or our neighborhoods from abandoned mines or chemical factories.
So, a while back, on another field trip, Price ran into a guy named Brian Rokvica.
Rokvica is a senior project manager with McGinley & Associates, an environmental consulting and engineering firm with offices in Las Vegas.
Rokvica volunteered to show Price’s students how core samples are taken from the ground. It involves a really huge drill, lots of pounding and earplugs.
Taking samples like that is done all the time, for reasons ranging from figuring out how deep the groundwater is to finding out whether a chemical plant poisoned the Earth.
He said he wanted to show the students this real world example for a couple of reasons, including the fact that it’s just plain cool.
But most importantly, he said, it’s because the Las Vegas area needs good environmental engineers and the like.
“Having qualified applicants around locally instead of having to recruit them nationally would really make a difference,” he said.
Right now, he said, his company is recruiting a job candidate from West Virginia. That costs a lot of money, and it doesn’t make much sense when unemployment is already so high here in Nevada.
He thinks that helping the local higher education system get better, even if it’s just this one class for now, is a good step in the right direction.
So the students gathered in the desert, a hundred yards or so away from the parking lot outside the building where their classroom was.
Two guys from Eagle Drilling, Shawn Sears and his assistant Eduardo Luis, raised the mast on the drill rig, which was basically a gigantic truck with an even bigger drill on the back.
They banged and clanked heavy steel things, then attached a hollow drill bit that was almost as big as a second-grader.
The machine twisted it into the ground, stopped. They inserted a sleeve of steel into the hollow bit, and the machine pounded it relentlessly into the dirt. This is where the earplugs came in handy.
Eventually, they retrieved it all from the ground, spilled the dirt into a stainless steel bowl and lectured the students on all the paperwork they now would have to do if this were real, all the procedures they would have to be aware of, all the regulations that govern what they have chosen to do for a living when they graduate.
They wrapped it all up, then, waved, and drove the huge truck away.
“Y’all, good luck with your futures,” Rokvica told them.
Back inside, the students said they felt like they learned something they wouldn’t have in class.
“Going out there and seeing it in real life is a lot better than getting it in a picture,” student Orson Homer said.
“Yeah,” said fellow student Kefty Eaton, “getting dirty is a lot better than reading a book.”
Contact reporter Richard Lake at rlake@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0307.
