Navigating the path to grad school
Blog post by 2025-2026 GEMS mentee Patrick Hullman
Most people who have been a toddler for some wobbly period of their life start out with the biggest dreams for their career. Somewhere between the grand ambitions and what is most normal, many of us eventually locate a middle ground to gamble a realistic career path for ourselves that we are content with. I was one of those people - I still am. The only variable is exactly how close our lives end up landing near the original target.
Half the equation is certainly a question of access to opportunity. However, I genuinely believe that an equally important reason - why many aim to become engineers at NASA instead of astronauts - is limited access to information on how anyone eventually gets to that dream position in life.
My dream job was to explore the ocean. I grew up during my summers on Lake Michigan in love with the water, in love with archaeology, in love with swimming as far down as I could go to see the bottom. I’ve always wanted to map the ocean to discover shipwrecks, and ideally drive the deepest submarine down that I can find the keys for. I had seen James Cameron pilot deep sea submarines on TV so I knew that job theoretically existed, but I had very little concrete understanding about how to get there as a career path.
I applied for a GEMS mentor at the end of my fieldwork in late Summer 2025, as I graduated with a reality punch in the gut and a diploma in my hand. I had graduated into the worst funding environment for ocean mapping in years. I was feeling like I had wasted 4 years and there was no path forward in my field. The GEMS mentorship program honestly changed a ton for me by putting me in touch with Ashton Flinders, a marine geophysicist at the University of Hawaii.
He was an expert in the weird, niche world of submarines, marine archaeology, ocean mapping, and graduate school. He took the time to chat with me about how this obscure dimension of ocean science works - the career paths to piloting submarines and charting seafloors. As I talked to him and his network of brilliant contacts who map the ocean, find shipwrecks, and pilot submarines - I ironically realized that there was no one standard path to mapping the ocean. Everyone was just as clueless as I was at one point, and everyone who ended up in this field had a different career trajectory to get there. Being such a niche occupation, it was all information I simply had no exposure to before, and it changed my entire outlook. It gave me such a profound sense of hope and renewed professional confidence that I needed at the time. My conversations with him and his contacts grounded a vague hail mary of a career goal into an organized series of possible choices that could take me where I want to go.
After a long gap year I’m currently pursuing a masters in Oceanography at the University of Rhode Island where I’m hoping to work with the Rhody ROV and NOAA’s Ocean Exploration Cooperative Institute to gain familiarity with acoustic sensing technologies associated with mapping the seafloor. I’m hoping to go on to work with submarines like the HOV Alvin out of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. I intend to employ this technology for archaeological applications to survey the seafloor for shipwrecks later in my life.
