M.Sc. Candidate at the University of Calgary

Zach standing on a rock pile with a rock sample during a day of fieldwork at the Kamenka Quarry (Sulphur Mountain Formation) near Harvie Heights, Alberta. This is the field location for Zach’s M.Sc. research.

I grew up in Gretna, a small town in southern Manitoba. I became interested in Geology when I came across the website geomore.com which explains the role of a Petroleum Geologist. The website highlights some key parts of being a petroleum geologist including that they work with lots of computers, data, and maps.

I received my B.Sc. (Honors) in Geology in 2020 from Brandon University and I am currently an M.Sc. candidate under the supervision of Dr. Per Pedersen at the University of Calgary. As an undergraduate student, I completed my B.Sc. honors thesis on the suitability of various clays in Southwestern Manitoba for use in road stabilization under the supervision of Ayat Baig.

Brandon University was an excellent place to do an undergrad in Geology. It is a smaller school, which means you get a lot more time to work and talk directly with the professors. That’s something that’s not so common in larger universities.

I have had the opportunity to work as a Geologist for ARC Resources, Syncrude, and Cenovus in fields including risk management, mine support, and new ventures. For my Master’s, I am studying natural fractures in the Sulphur Mountain Formation which is an outcrop analog of one of Canada’s most proliferous unconventional resource plays, the Lower Triassic Montney Formation.

What I love about geology is collecting data, organizing it, and then building up a story, based on what the data is telling me. Geoscience is a very large field with many different subdisciplines and career paths. The trick is to figure out what interests you and to follow it because the only way to do great work is to love what you do.