Giving Thanks: Scholarship Helps Geological Sciences Major Study Ancient Ecosystems

This December, members of our Fulbright College Family are sharing expressions of gratitude, letters of thanks and their appreciation for those who have helped make their educational journey possible.  

Meet Aliera Konett, who thanks to the Harold MacDonald Endowed Memorial Award Scholarship, is one step closer to her dream of discovering new facts about the paleoclimatology of the world and reconstructing ancient ecosystems to see what they can tell us about our world’s past and future.

Harold MacDonald Endowed Memorial Award Scholarship Recipient Aliera Konett

Name: Aliera Konett

Hometown: East Lansing

Anticipated Graduation: 2024

Major(s)/Minor(s): Geological Sciences 

Activities/Interests: I enjoy caving, kayaking, writing and volunteering with the Girl Scouts of America when I have time around my classes. I also enjoy haunting libraries for new books to read!

Career Aspirations: I want to use new methods of isotopic study to determine new facts about the paleoclimatology of the world. I would like to reconstruct ancient ecosystems to see what they can tell us about our past and our future.

In her own words:

Dear Mr. MacDonald and Mrs. Donnelly,

I am honored to receive the Harold MacDonald Endowed Memorial Award for this school year. Funds like this are such an important part of enabling students such as myself to pursue higher learning in this capacity.

The barriers to someone like myself, a Hispanic student who was the first in their family to reach for a goal like this in academics, are staggering. Without endowments such as this, so many underprivileged students such as myself wouldn’t have the option to continue on with the dreams they have held for so long.

For me, this means achieving a years-long goal of being able to study a paleontological site right here in northwest Arkansas, called the Conard Fissure. In the early 1900’s this sight was excavated by Barnum Brown, the same person who discovered T.rex. Unfortunately, the discovery in Arkansas was overshadowed by the previous find, and thus nobody has worked on the material for the site in over a hundred years.

Advances in the scientific technology available are staggering enough that this could be a wealth of scientific data about the ancient past of Arkansas. It also includes no less than 15 sabertooth cats that were pulled out of the fissure.

I look forward to being able to utilize the funds provided to support myself and my scientific endeavors. This generosity funds the next generation of bright young scientists and artists to find their voices in spaces that, traditionally, haven’t been very welcoming to those without the capacity to lean on their families for financial support, or that don’t have outside sources of income.

The world of academia is a closed space with few avenues to allow new voices in. The work that you are doing directly enables myself and many others just like me to be able to show what we are capable of, regardless of our former financial status.

For this, and for the many other students like myself, I would like to offer my most sincere thank you.

Thank you for seeing the worth in assisting students to reach new and higher heights, to create masterpieces of the heart and innovations of science. To allow myself to do what I have always wanted to do, and finally lay my hands on the fragments of our ancient past.

I hope that the discoveries I make and the work that I do will set an example to the younger people around me, that dreams like mine aren’t as unreachable as they once were.

Best,

Aliera Konett