Even before they collect their bachelor’s degrees, La Salle students are exploring their future career paths through real-world experiences. Junior Geology major, Nicole Trenholm, is one of the many La Salle students who have gotten their hands dirty—sometimes literally—in their chosen fields.

Nicole discovered early on that there are many areas within her major in which she could choose to concentrate. To date, she’s already tried out several of the options available to her.

Last summer, Trenholm spent two weeks in South Dakota prospecting for fossils in the Bijou Hills and along the Missouri River. She and her classmates worked to retrieve the remains of a mosasaur, a marine predator that was essentially a hybrid of a dinosaur and a reptile.

She also held an internship last summer at Duffield Associates in Delaware, a geosciences consulting company. This summer, she hopes to work on precision digital geologic mapping on the Maine coastline.

“I would suggest that students from all concentrations make acquiring an internship a priority,” she said.