Megan Berg

UNL junior Megan Berg may be the luckiest person on the planet. At just 19 years old, she is the media specialist for ANDRILL, a multi million dollar geological drilling project in Antarctica. This fall, she is gathering a Sony HDV camera, a Nikon D80 digital SLR, a G5 Power Mac, two terabytes of hard drive space, 100 mini DV tapes, 5 lens filters, 9 lithium ion batteries, 2 tripods, an HDV camera deck, and a tripod dolly, and setting out to record history in the making.

"Usually before I travel I get nervous - I get butterflies in my stomach," she said recently. "But right now, I'm just really focused on what I need to pack and finishing things up at work. Maybe it's the calm before the storm." She added that when she accepted her job, she was told it would involve travel - but no one specifically mentioned Antarctica.

Megan will record the daily routines and research of an international team of more than 200 scientists, students, and educators, including members of the ANDRILL Science Management Team, which is housed at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Their chief objective is to drill back in time to recover a history of paleoenvironmental changes, to learn more about glacial and interglacial changes in the Antarctica region. The research has implications for our understanding of global warming and climate change.

In addition to documenting the team's field work, Megan is also responsible for running Project Iceberg, a web program designed for middle school science students that will feature video clips, blogs, field journals and photos.

Next spring, Berg, a history major, will return to classes UNL. As for what comes after graduation? She's not sure...yet. "I would love to go into education, maybe try something completely different like Teach for America or the Peace Corps," she said. "But who knows? In life you end up meeting people who lead you down an entirely different path, so I'm kind of expecting that to happen..."