When Terra Ganey ’21 first got to Wesleyan, she was a quieter, more introverted version of herself today. Now that Ganey is in her last semester, you can find her working at WesWings, leading the rugby team, or tossing a frisbee on Foss Hill with friends. In a break from researching sediment transport and alien features on Venus, Ganey talked to the Argus about being a woman studying the sciences, having her senior year in a pandemic, and building a community she loves.

 

The Argus: It’s your last semester on campus. How are you feeling about it?

Terra Ganey: It’s kind of bittersweet. I am very happy that I’m here. I think we’re very lucky to have the opportunity to be on campus; I know a lot of people who don’t have that chance. I’m very lucky in that I live with four other seniors, and we have a house, and that’s my social world. It’s great to have that resource and be able to work together and be able to cohabitate. But at the same time, it is weird to have your last semester be dominated by a global pandemic and to feel like you don’t really get to experience the same social scene that you would have otherwise. It’s really made me think about who I want to spend time with and who I’m going to make the effort to see. So, I find myself putting more effort into the relationships I care about because it does sometimes suck to take a walk outside when it’s really, really cold. But when you really care about people and it’s your last semester, you make that effort.

A: What are you writing your thesis about?

TG: I am writing a thesis on sediment transport and alien features on Venus. A lot of the—well, all of the sediment on Venus is produced by impact cratering, and nobody really knows how much there is, or where it goes, or how it’s transported, so I am studying that. We’ve identified some dune fields and some weird erosional features and things. It’s pretty cool. It’s very much uncharted waters.

A: How did you come up with that topic?

TG: I’m an Earth and Environmental Science major and Astronomy major, and Planetary Science is the intersection of those two things. I did astronomy research for a long time, but then I decided I was more of an ‘our solar system’ type of person and not other solar systems, which a lot of people are. And that’s a great thing, but that’s not me. I spoke to Dr. Marty (Martha) Gilmore, who’s my advisor, and we came up with this project because the amount of sediment on a planet allows you to determine a lot of things about surface processes. If you have 10g of sediment and you know 5g of it is being deposited in some basin, then you have to find where the other five goes. If you don’t know the original volume, you have no idea what’s going on. We know those numbers for Earth and for Mars. We don’t know them for Venus. The problem is if you don’t know how much [there is], you have no idea what’s happening to it.  There’s just no knowledge of what’s happening to all of the material on Venus, and it’s a really important question.

A: What made you want to do your majors and minor?

TG: I came in as an Astronomy and Physics major, and then I decided that Physics was the worst thing ever, so I dropped that. I started taking classes in the Earth Sciences department and just loved them. Both my parents are environmental scientists, so I think it was just a matter of me finding the classes that interested me and really gelling with the professors and the department. And I stuck with Astro. It’s been good, Astro—it’s difficult, and I think I’ve gravitated way more toward the Earth Science side of things, but I’m still grateful for that community and that academic side of things as well because it’s honestly been very foundational to my Planetary Science stuff.

A: Switching gears a little bit, why do you think you were chosen to be a WesCeleb?

TG: Oh man, it’s gotta be the ’Swings gig. I feel like if anybody were to recognize me on campus, it’s probably because they’ve seen me at ’Swings. It’s very student-body facing, and I’ve spent a lot of time there over the past four years.

A: Can you tell me more about what it’s like working at ’Swings?

TG: I’m so grateful. That’s really my biggest feeling about it. A lot of my social life, especially during the pandemic, has been through my job. A lot of my very close friends have been co-workers. It allows me to run in a bunch of different circles that I ordinarily would not have been involved with at all. Obviously everybody has their friends within their major, but I’ve met so many people through working at ’Swings, [where] the only overlap is the job. I have really valued their experiences and their perspectives and now it’s my chance to see everybody. Like I said earlier, I’ve been very intentional about who I spend time with, but at work it’s super easy. If someone I haven’t seen in a year comes in and gets a sandwich, there’s a thirty-second interaction and it’s great. It’s just really a very vibrant, loving place. Maybe the downside is picking up lobster claws outside after Lobsterfest, but that’s it.

A: Can you tell me a little bit about your experience on the rugby team?

TG: Rugby has also been a huge part of my college life. I was a lot more involved with it my sophomore and junior year, mostly because we obviously haven’t been doing anything [during COVID-19]. It’s been a really interesting opportunity for me on the leadership side of things. I tend to not be the kind of person who’s going to step in and lead a large group of people, but I fell into that role as a sophomore when a lot of our team was graduating and there were just me and a couple of juniors and a couple of people in my class. It’s been fun, and I think I’ve gained a lot of skills that you wouldn’t generally attribute to a sports team. Mostly leadership, organizational, team-building.

It was kind of a grassroots effort because when my class came in, the team was very small. Both the women’s side and the men’s side—the teams were very small, and we really made an effort. There’s actually an Argus article about me and Casimir Fulleylove Golob [’21], who’s the captain of the men’s side, and how we merged the teams, and the effort that we put in bringing people together and merging a community instead of having two separate entities. That’s also been really important, and I wish it was still happening now. We still have Zoom meetings and will play online Pictionary, but it’s not the same, and I guess that’s another thing that I miss.

A: You’re also on the frisbee team. Can you talk about that?

TG: I live with two frisbee players, two people who have played frisbee since their freshman year, and sophomore year they tried to get me to join with them. I was still very heavily involved with rugby. We were traveling most weekends, so I didn’t really have the chance to [join frisbee]. Junior year, for some reason, I just decided to go to practice with them and I kept going to practices. I started going to social events. It also helped that we lived together a junior year and frisbee people were always in our house. And then all of a sudden I was part of frisbee. I went to Myrtle Beach with them—with Throw Culture—last spring, right as the pandemic started, we were in South Carolina, which is just insane to think about now. Being at a tournament with schools from all over the country right at the cusp of an [pandemic.] I love the frisbee team. They are so fun, and again with the many different circles, many different types of people, it’s really felt like a very welcoming environment, mostly because there’s no skill requirement at all.

A: Do you have any adults who were really influential during your time here?

TG: I would say in the first place, my advisor, Marty Gilmore, just because she’s been an incredible personal mentor to me and also a scientific mother figure. I would also say Seth Redfield, who’s in the Astronomy department. He was my first advisor when I got here. I started doing research with him when I was a freshman, and he was the first person who taught me what it really means to do science. Like, how do we frame scientific questions, how do we go about answering them, and how do we present those answers. Even after I left his lab and came to work with Marty, he has always been—I consider him a friend at this point. We will get on a Zoom to chat and talk about—we both like to travel, so we’ll talk about that. I’m in the process of figuring out what I’m doing next year, and even though he’s on sabbatical, he’s always available for me to talk to and hash things out with. He’s a really inspiring person, and I really look up to him a lot.

A: You started to bring it up. I’m wondering if you have any postgraduate plans?

TG: I am going to do my Ph.D. in Earth Science. I have three offers. I have no idea which one I’m going to pick. Each one of them is better than the next, and then every time I think I’ve decided on a place, I’m like ‘but wait what about the other one? I really liked that one too.’ I’m hoping to be a paleoclimatologist and sort of a paleoceanographer, which is the study of Earth’s climate and the oceans over time and how they’ve responded to different things, different feedbacks. I’m really interested in what’s happening at extinction boundaries when the climate is drastically changing in response to biotic drivers and abiotic drivers.

A: I was just wondering if you had anything to say about what it’s like to be a woman pursuing the sciences.

TG: It’s such an important issue, and I’ve been thinking about it a lot, especially going into grad school. There is this issue—we call it the ’leaky pipeline’—where women are accepted to grad schools at similar rates to men, because academic institutions have identified that and remedied it, but the problem is then retention. I think a really good gauge of the culture at the grad school is how many of those women continue and finish their doctorate or even finish their masters. It is an emotional burden that you put on yourself if you are going to enter an environment that does not support you.

It’s something I talk to Marty about, and she is one of the only female faculty [members] in our department. Even though I feel very supported and close with the male faculty, it is a weird dynamic where sometimes you will say something in class and it gets brushed aside, and then all of a sudden one of your male classmates says the same thing, and then it’s like ‘oh that’s a great idea,’ and you’re just like ‘I said that five minutes ago.’ And in talking to her, it’s even something that happens to her in her professional life. It happens to her every day. She’ll be at a conference with adult professional scientists who should know better, but they’re just not aware of their implicit bias.

It’s a work in progress, and sometimes I think the hardest thing is feeling like it’s your job as a woman to make the difference. Sometimes the way to instill change is to be that first woman in the program. You know, like step into a space that’s all-male and say ‘hey I’m here now and we’re going to change things,’ but also, that sucks for you. It’s hard. It’s really hard because if you’re working on a Ph.D., you don’t want to spend emotional labor on correcting men. I just have to decide if I want to step into those spaces and be a driver of change, need to be in a space that is more female-dominated and make change a different way. Make a change by putting my work out there and being a really awesome scientist. I think mostly what I would like to do is both those things, but sometimes there’s a strange intersection.

A: How would you characterize Wesleyan specifically in this respect? Is there room for growth?

TG: There is absolutely room for growth. I’ve had a great experience as I said. I have experienced no sexism or discrimination at all in either of my departments. Mostly because I think our faculty is acutely aware of it, which is great, but also we don’t have that many female faculty. It’s mostly still men, especially in the Astro department. Right now we’re looking at new hires because one of our faculty is retiring this year and there is a big push to have that faculty [member] be a woman or a woman of color. I think the biggest place to grow at this point is racial equality. If we’re talking about diversity and inclusion, sure gender is getting there, but what’s not getting there is race. We are a predominantly white institution and the sciences, I don’t have stats to back this up, but I’m pretty sure are more white than the other departments and academic groupings. I think that’s the biggest place for growth.

A: If you could describe your Wesleyan experience with a song what would it be and why?

TG: I’m trying to think of what I’ve listened to lately. Maybe “Book of Love” by the Magnetic Fields, or Fleetwood Mac, there’s both. I think that a lot of the themes that we’ve touched on are about community and finding your people, and college is the time that you are most social. And I’ve found a lot more love here than I’ve found in any other space that I’ve ever been in in my life. I feel an extremely deep love for my housemates, for my coworkers, for my teammates, and even for the people in my major. When you do things together, when you live together, when you spend all of your time with other people your own age, you foster this sense of really deep love for everybody else, but also for yourself and what you’re doing. I think that’s so important, and it’s been a huge, to continue the metaphor, chapter of my time at Wesleyan. That’s just the most important part. If I did not feel loved and feel love for other people then I would not be successful.

 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Olivia Luppino can be reached at oluppino@wesleyan.edu