Get to know our intern – Angela Jackson

In true first-blog-post fashion, I figured I would do a little ‘get to know you segment’. This is going to be a long one – patience is a virtue, young grasshoppa’ (and there are pictures!).

I was raised in Llano, Texas, by my family who has lived there for generations. The Texas Hill Country is where my love of the outdoors began, even though in hindsight I did not know how much wild places meant to me until recent years. I traveled to Big Bend National Park with my family for a Thanksgiving trip in 2016 and was absolutely blown away at the sheer beauty of that landscape. It changed my life. I suddenly found myself curious about what the colors of the rocks meant, why the clouds looked the way they did, and how everything in the wild spaces worked together.

As I was leaving that park in the truck with my family, thoughts were racing through my mind of the quickest way that I could abandon my college nursing and health classes to be able to spend the rest of my life in nature. I could be a geologist! Oh, never mind, that is WAY too much math. Meteorology maybe? That would be THE COOLEST, but atmospheric physics? Gulp. Finally, I decided to go with the “catch all” approach. Environmental Science/Policy gave me the overview of the whole natural system of the Earth and the Laws (God-made) and laws (man-made) that govern it. Solid choice. I feel like I came home every single day from class with something exciting about what I had learned about the Earth that day to share with my roommates. They always feigned excitement to keep me happy. During the remainder of my college career, I took extremely difficult but immensely rewarding classes about rocks, the atmosphere, and applied sciences. I met David Pendergrass – Executive Director and Lead Scientist of Sweetwater Research – in a class that just so happened to encompass all of my aforementioned interests, a notoriously difficult class known as Environmental Techniques. Just the mere utterance of those words on the geoscience floor of the science building makes students shake in their boots. This class, although tough, was my favorite because it introduced me to water science.

Growing up I had spent a lot of time fishing with my dad in the lakes in the Hill Country. I always loved the water, which, in my life story seems kind of weird. When I was six years old, my youngest sister (two years old at the time) was tragically taken from my family. In a creek in my backyard, my baby sister was swept away by the rushing current created by a recent heavy rain and she drowned.

As an adult, I connect this traumatic incident from my childhood to my purpose in life. Being in water, being by water, listening to moving water, soothes my soul. It is where I feel most at peace, connected to God, and to the Earth. I know the power that nature has, I also know the unspeakable beauty of it, and I recognize the ways that God plays into all of it. The recognition of that connection has inspired me to pursue water science in any way that I can. As I intern for Sweetwater Research, I am also working for the Texas Institute for Applied Environmental Research (TiAER). Yes, two jobs where I am constantly surrounded with water – a literal dream. I sometimes can’t even believe it is real. What a blessing!

I proudly come from a long line of blue-collar workers who taught me that working hard and having integrity will take me far in life, and that I can be anything I want to be if I have those two character traits. I am honored to represent my family as a first generation college graduate. I graduated in December 2018 with a B.S. in Environmental Science with an emphasis in Environmental Policy from the Best Kept Secret in Texas, Tarleton State University. My future goals are to pursue graduate school.

The biggest dream that I have is to work in Antarctica on a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) research vessel (I will save that story for another time). My internship with David and Sweetwater Research is going to be a solid foundation for wherever the Lord takes me in the future. I am beyond excited to share my scholarly growth as well as my spiritual growth with all those who are supporters of Sweetwater Research and myself! TYIA!