A summer on ice A St. Norbert student gets up close and personal with an Alaskan glacier By Ray Barrington News-Chronicle Many college students spend their summers on the job, or perhaps on the beach. Jackie Shumway spent hers, literally, on ice. Shumway, a junior at St. Norbert College in De Pere, spent her summer in an internship on the Matanuska glacier in Alaska, about 2 1/2 hours east of Anchorage. "It was gorgeous," she said. "The glacier is located in between two different mountain ranges, not more than a couple of miles away. The mountains were glaciated, and they had a lot of really cool features." Shumway, a geology major who attended Bay Port High School, was there on a National Science Foundation internship, providing research experience for undergraduates. She was there from June 1 to July 12. "It's a program to help us understand how to do a research project and what it involves," she said. "When we got up there, they showed us around the different parts of the glacier. There were six students, and we each had to pick a project. "Then we had to come up with the steps on how to answer our questions, using a series of experiments using different instruments to measure different aspects of the glacier." Shumway chose to measure the velocity of the glacier. That required setting up surveying equipment just off the glacier and measuring various spots. "The total station I was working with was pretty heavy. It was on three packs and I had to carry it out onto the ice," she said. "It was the first time I had ever seen a glacier, and there's a lot of danger when walking on it." But she wasn't just working on her own project. "My project took about two hours every day. For the rest of the day, I was helping other people with their projects," she said. Back in De Pere, she will spend her time analyzing the data she collected for a paper to be presented at the Geological Society of America's regional meeting next spring in Missouri. Shumway wasn't interested in geology in high school, she said. "I was looking for colleges. I wanted to be an environmental science major. I was looking through course catalogs at other sciences and found geology. The course description said it was about the earth, and that's the kind of science I'm interested in," she said. "In middle school and elementary school, science was always my favorite part of class, things like knowing how volcanoes worked." She worked with professor Nelson Ham, who suggested the internship to her. Shumway hopes to use her knowledge in an educational setting. "I always had kind of thought about teaching. I might get my education degree and teach earth science in middle or high school," she said. "Or maybe I'll get my masters, I don't really know yet. But I would like to teach someday. Maybe I could go get my Ph.D. and be a professor - that's my ultimate goal."