Camila van der Maal is a senior general geology major at the Jackson School of Geosciences who has spent the past four years immersing herself in any research she can take part in.
As a freshman, she was the only undergraduate that professor Peter Flemings took on a trip to a Helix Q4000 drilling vessel in the Gulf of Mexico as part of an expedition devoted to studying methane hydrates. Opportunities such as this gave van der Maal the ability to further her passion for research and helped her decide to pursue a Ph.D.
“I came back a whole new student, with all of these paths and ideas opened up for me,” she said. Now as a senior, van der Maal says that UT has changed her life in ways she never could have imagined.
“I remember going to Gone to Texas as a freshman and seeing the banner and seeing What Starts Here Changes the World and thinking ‘Oh, it’s just their slogan,’ but now that I’ve been here for four years, I’ve come to realize that it’s true. It’s changed my world at least.”
Although she was always highly driven and passionate about science, van der Maal wasn’t sure she would be able to go to college.
“Being a first-generation college student, everything was new to me and my family,” she said. “I didn’t know how I was going to pay. I didn’t really understand how student loans worked. UT granted me scholarships, and they really facilitated my ability to take all these classes and to go on these field trips … I was able to travel to so many places and study so much science that I didn’t know existed.”
