Mike Caron (MS Geology, 2003)

OK, Nick - enough hounding already! Yes, I do have a real job (although there are times I wish I didn't). My first degree (BS Geology '74) was from the University of British Columbia (that's up north in Canada for the geographically challenged among us) and, upon earning the old sheepskin, I spent nearly 30 years seeing the world on someone else's nickel (actually, on the nickel of the mineral exploration company I worked for). My postings included Vancouver and Seattle (porphyry copper and molybdenum exploration in the Cascades and the Okanogan highlands), Atlanta (brambles and massive sulfide deposits in the Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina piedmont), Salt Lake City (gold deposits in the Basin and Range of western Utah and eastern Nevada, along with a little work in Idaho and Montana), Vancouver again (gold skarn exploration throughout British Columbia), Helena, Montana (more gold skarn work in British Columbia, Washington, and Idaho), Accra, Ghana (gold exploration in Ghana, Cote d'Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Mali, Guinea, and Tanzania), Houston, Texas (corporate office, mostly working in Mexico and Bolivia), and La Paz, Bolivia (exploration around an operating gold mine on the high altiplano).

After getting caught in a corporate merger in 2001 where our new masters showed everyone in middle management over the age of 45 the way out, I returned to the US and decided to see what it would be like to do that Master's degree that I had always put off. After visiting Central, Lisa and Charlie took pity on me and the next thing I knew, I was off on a wild trip with Doc Bentley and a group of stunned graduate students (aren't we ever going to look at anything besides the CRB's?). After sweating my way through a math- and structure-heavy GPS inversion thesis with Meghan and graduating in early 2003, I worked for about 6 months for an exploration consultant in Vancouver and then found work in the environmental business.

I currently manage the Richland office of a company called GRAM, Inc. that is working in environmental restoration at the Hanford nuclear site. We have 10 employees at the present time, including 8 geologists (and a couple of environmental scientists who wish they were geologists). Four of our current employees are CWU Geology graduates and they do great work for us. We do a lot of field work at Hanford, installing various types of groundwater and vadose zone wells, in addition to what seems like a lot of routine report writing related to various groundwater treatment systems. We have also been heavily involved in writing various planning documents, including feasibility studies, for site clean-up work. In addition to managing the office, I seem to have become the go-to guy for a lot of graphics and mapping applications, no doubt due to some skills I brought with me from my previous career, as well as from some GIS coursework I took at CWU.

Geology has been a great career for me and I have never lacked for work or for interesting things to do or interesting places to go (some of them maybe a little too interesting - Nigeria springs to mind). I live in north Richland near the Columbia River and am finding Richland an interesting and fulfilling place to live and work. I have recently taken up motorcycle riding and am finding a whole new perspective on rocks I pass by on my various trips in Washington and Oregon.