The trio (Yunlang Zang, Michaela Galarza, and Tamara Jeffries) of EEPS students attended the GSA meeting in Denver on October 8-12/22. During the meeting Yunlang Zang and Michaela Galarza received the OTF award that enabled them to attend the meeting and mentorship program. Tamara Jeffries though was not on the mentorship program list but presented a poster on her project entitled, “Hypoxia and climate condition of the central basin of Lake Erie, North America: Insights from geochemistry, ostracod, and pollen records during the Holocene”, in which she did in collaboration with her advisors – Dr. Beverly Saylor and Dr. Onema Adojoh. The study aimed to understand the ongoing presence of hypoxic conditions within a hypolimnion layer in Lake Erie’s Central Basin by tracking the distribution of ostracods (seed shrimp) within a 10m long sediment core. GSA Connects 2022 was very inspiring, productive, and informative to the students given the array and gallery of poster presentation sessions they attended. Most importantly, the OTF career short course seems to have inspired them to think of graduate schools and life after graduation.