Carolina Environmental Professionals Network

When I started the Carolina Environmental Consulting Profesisonals Network on LinkedIn in May I hoped we could get a decent sized group of Carolina Environmental professionals by the end of the year. I was pleasantly surprised when we reached the 100 member mark last week.

The group has built a solid foundation of members throughout the Carolinas (and beyond) in a short time. We have members from the consulting and contracting industry and regulators, and others in related industries, so our network is well represented to answer questions of our members.

Going forward I would like to see the network expand. I hope our members will invite their connections and coworkers to join for this group so it can become the best resource it can be for environmental professionals in the Carolinas. I hope more people will contribute discussions and news items in the future. I plan to try to keep members posted of organizations of interest and upcoming meetings. I hope to organize an informal meeting sometime next year for the group.

Environmental meetings

I recently attended several meetings of environmental groups in the Carolinas. I found this to be a good opportunity to meet with other environmental professionals in the area. I particuarly found the AEG Carolina Section meeting to be beneficial and thought the discussion topic was very helpful. I encourage others to check out this organization. There are several more meetings from various groups coming up. This time of year is poplular for meetings for environmental and geology groups, but it would be better if they were spread out a bit better. Also better and earlier notification of upcoming meetings on the websites would be helpful especially when so many organizations have meetings within a few weeks of each other a it is unfortunately not usually possible to attend them all.

Done with the ASBOG

I took the ASBOG test on Friday up in Raleigh. It was difficult but not to bad, there was a lot on earthquakes & faults and lots of mining that are not areas I am that familiar with. It did not have as much Hydro or mapping as I thought and there were not as many problems needing math formulas as I thought their would be. I thought the fundamentals part was the easier of the 2 and am sure I passed, I will have to wait on the practical part to know for sure if I passed that but overall I think it went well.

After that I went to the Raleigh International Festival and had a good time and some very interesting food. I also went down to Wilmington, NC on the way to Raleigh (not exactly on the way from Charlotte but better than a separate trip) to get my TWIC Card application, photo, and fingerprinting done. They tried to do enter me for over 2 hours but kept having computer problems. It would get part way through and they would have to start over (They have no way to save it until they process the entire application) this happened 5 times. In the end I wasted about 5 hours and will have to go back and start over when they fix their computer which is ridiculous since they have so few facilities and it is about a 4 hour drive each way. Maybe the Federal government needs to get some computers that are not antiques and actually hire programmers to design a program that works and doesn't require a restart anytime they don't finish entering it. The mess in Wilmington cost me a couple of hours I could have used for some last minute studying for the ASBOG.

On a side note, I found an interesting site of blogs all focused on geology:

http://geoblogs.stratigraphy.net/?action=list