Beth Dushman '03 and Matt "Rocky" Severs '02 inside the Alvin research submarine.

If research-based learning at Colby needed a poster boy, it could do worse than Matt "Rocky" Severs '02. After examining pond sediments in Bermuda for evidence of sea levels rising over the past 11 millennia, Severs did some fairly intensive work on a 50-mile lobe of bedrock formation just southeast of Moosehead Lake--mapping, geochemical analysis, magnetic variation.

Then, in his senior year a January internship opportunity opened up for him and Beth Dushman '03, and both went to sea for 35 days on the research vessel Atlantis. They served as assistants in the deployment of the Alvin deep-sea submersible and as lab technicians analyzing geologic samples from the East Pacific Rise.

Severs had the nickname Rocky long before he switched his major to geology, even before he arrived at Colby from Indiana expecting to major in history. "Geology offered me more opportunities to do things I enjoy, like outdoor research and travel," he said. He took a mineralogy course with Professor Don Allen, "the hard rock guy," in the fall of his sophomore year and soon was taken with what he called "a tight and very strong department."

Asked about his ambitious research schedule, which he fit around a semester abroad at St. Andrews University in Scotland, Severs said, "Basically, scientific curiosity is what drives it. For starters, as an undergraduate you don't generally do research unless you actively pursue it." And pursue it he did, with Bruce Rueger (senior teaching associate) in Bermuda and Allen in Maine.

The Alvin is lowered into the sea.

Then, when Assistant Professor Jennifer Shosa injured her knee, she ceded her space working on the Alvin cruise to her students. "Very few professional oceanographers get the opportunity to be part of an Alvin cruise, and I thought the fact that Colby undergraduate science majors had--and took--the opportunity was pretty incredible," Shosa said. She arranged a research grant through Colby's Howard Hughes Medical Institute funding, and the pair of students spent more than a month at sea studying with Karen Von Damm of the University of New Hampshire, the world's leading expert on sea-floor hydrothermal vents called "black smokers."

"I didn't want to pass it up," Severs said. "It was a great opportunity to see quality research, to see a research cruise, to see science in the real world." And he liked what he saw. So, after graduating magna cum laude with honors in his major, Rocky Severs headed for more geology research, at Virginia Tech, where he's entering a Ph.D. program.