Realizing a dream

Craig Hulsey graduates this month with master’s degree in geology

By California State University, Bakersfield

May 12^th, 2022

Craig Hulsey knew he wanted to be a scientist when he was in the first grade, drawing in a book a picture of himself in the future dressed in a white lab coat, colorful vials in hand. It hasn’t been a direct route getting there, but this spring, Hulsey officially becomes that scientist, albeit with a slightly different wardrobe from that childhood vision.

Hulsey will soon graduate with his master’s degree in geology from California State University, Bakersfield’s School of Natural Sciences, Mathematics and Engineering, where he previously earned his bachelor’s degree in the same subject. While his first CSUB commencement was more for his parents, this one is different.

“I am actually looking forward to this one,” Hulsey said. “It’s a cool feeling to know that somehow I am realizing that first grade self’s dream.”

In the world of geology, Hulsey has swapped the stereotypical white coat and sterile lab for comfortable boots and on-site field trips. He’s worked for Aera Energy for nine years, currently as a geoscience technician. Earning his master’s degree was a way to potentially advance his career and, he said, to finally feel like a scientist.

“I didn’t really feel like I could call myself a scientist coming out of undergrad,” said Hulsey, adding that it was working on research with adviser Dr. Katie O’Sullivan that helped him to feel official. “It’s not until I went through graduate school that I really felt that I was a scientist.”

Finding geology

In between those first dreams of becoming a scientist and graduating with his master’s this month, Hulsey graduated from Centennial High School in 2007. The Bakersfield native and first-generation college graduate did well in school, taking honors and advanced placement courses, but felt like he wasn’t smart enough to pursue science heading into college. Instead, he chose to study business at Cal Poly, but quickly found he didn’t enjoy it. He dropped out of classes and started working as a server at local restaurants.

“That's a pretty humbling experience in and of itself,” Hulsey said of waiting tables. “A couple of years of serving reignited the fire to go back to school.”

While finishing up his business degree at Bakersfield College, Hulsey needed to take a science class to fulfill general education requirements. Geology was a random but auspicious choice.

“I just kind of fell in love with that class,” Hulsey, now 33, recalled. “It was the first course I took where I looked forward to going to class, I looked forward to doing the assignments. I was in class every single day. Doing every single assignment, getting A's again, and it made it made all the other ancillary courses you have to take in undergrad worth it.”

Transferring to CSUB, Hulsey knew he wanted to major in geology. As a part-time student working full-time at Aera, completing his bachelor’s degree took Hulsey a little longer than if he had pursued it right after high school, but finally studying what he was interested in kept him focused and motivated. It helped that his employer was not only flexible with his schedule, but financially supportive too: as long as Hulsey got good grades, they would reimburse the tuition.

“Working at Aera has been one of the best experiences,” he said. “They take such great care of their people there.”

As an undergraduate, Hulsey’s appreciation for geology deepened even more. Geology isn’t just one science, he said, but several combined in one.

“Geology is so cool, because it's taking every aspect of science, and then it's also combining it with history, so you've got a story of everything,” Hulsey said. “You study things in chemistry and you're seeing drawn diagrams. But when you hold a piece of quartz up to the light, we can see the crystal form that it's taking. You're literally holding chemistry.”

Shooting for the moon

Starting graduate school in 2019, Hulsey thought it would be nice if his research involved energy or oil, topics close to his work at Aera. Instead, he opted to work with Dr. O’Sullivan on something a little farther away from those areas, or from Earth.

“She gave me three options to possibly work on, and one of them was researching the moon and lunar meteorites,” Hulsey said. “And I was just like, well, that's cooler than everything.”

With Dr. O’Sullivan, Hulsey studied lunar meteorite samples and compared them with samples of the moon returned from NASA’s Apollo missions. While the Apollo samples come from a localized region of the nearside of the moon, lunar meteorites have an equally likely chance to be from the far side of the moon, letting scientists explore the differences and learn more about the moon’s overall composition. Apollo samples, for instance, show iron-rich anorthosite, while meteorite samples, which could be from anywhere on the moon, show magnesium-rich anorthosite.

“Through analyzing this lunar meteorite, this research is allowing us to test some of the current paradigms and ways of thinking on how the interior of the moon evolved,” Hulsey explained. “So the question is, what’s the crust really mainly composed of? It seems the lunar meteorites should be statistically more representative of the global lunar crust; then maybe the crust samples from the Apollo missions are really more of an anomaly.”

None of Hulsey’s undergraduate classes covered lunar geology, so getting prepared for this research was tough. Dr. O’Sullivan presented him with a large book on the subject and assigned it as “summer school” to get up to speed on the work he would be doing.

“Years later, now I feel like I've got a pretty good handle on the area of research that I’ve done,” he said. “I told her a while back, if I knew all the things that I know now, having gone through this process, I could have done this project in less than half the time, and she just laughed. She's like, ‘That's the whole point of this.’”

Dr. O’Sullivan said Hulsey was the first person ever to collect detailed geochemical data on the specific meteorite he studied.

“When the stone arrived in the mail, we weren’t sure what to expect; there was even a small chance it wasn’t from the moon!” Dr. O’Sullivan said. “So one of the first things Craig had to do was confirm it was from the moon. After that, he collected various types of geochemical data at labs all over the country. In doing so, Craig has become the world’s foremost expert on the meteorite and the specific group it belongs to, and he presented his findings at a national conference earlier this year.”

Hulsey said some people may wonder why it matters to know what the moon is made of, or wonder why scientists would even care. For him, it’s all about the story its geology tells.

“It’s pretty cool to be able to use the tools that we have developed over time to try to tell the story of what happened,” Hulsey said. “That’s what all of geology is in general, trying to unfold the complex history of the geologic processes that have shaped our world and the ones around us over vast lengths of time. It’s pretty cool if you can tell a story about something based on what you’re able to measure from it and you can break out a storyline and come up with something that holds up to scrutiny.”

Life after school

Now is a time full of transitions for Hulsey. After what he admits has been a long educational journey, he’s finally seeing an end in sight. At the same time, he’s also just become a first-time father, with the birth of his and his wife’s daughter, Rylie, in late March.

The timing of things ended up being “a blessing,” Hulsey said, as his paternity leave gave him the time he needed to complete his thesis this semester. Without it, he thinks he probably would have had to finish in the fall.

“I was afraid at first, because everyone told me when you have a kid you don’t have time for anything else,” he said. “But Rylie was sleeping in three- to four-hour time blocks, so it ended up working out in my favor to have all other time aside from taking care of my wife and baby to devote to finishing up my thesis.”

With graduation around the corner, Hulsey said it will be weird to no longer have reading assignments or papers hanging over his head, after more than 10 years of being in school off and on. He’s looking forward to having time to spend on his hobbies, like hiking, fishing and hunting.

“Having a Saturday where I can wake up and go enjoy some activity and not have in the back of my mind, ‘Did I read that paper?’ – it’s going to be nice,” he said. “It’s just finally getting on with living. I can just get into my career and focus on raising a family now ….