The Jackson School of Geosciences fundraised over $700,000 during the University’s fundraising challenge on April 11 and 12 to fund the construction of a pavilion in an outdoor learning center off campus. 

The pavilion’s construction in the White Family Outdoor Learning Center, which spans 266 acres in the Texas Hill Country, aims to support learning opportunities for geoscience and natural sciences students. Michael Young, associate dean of research for the Jackson School of Geosciences, said students and faculty perform field experiments at the Center, studying hill country geology and environment a couple times a week. 

The pavilion’s planned amenities include Wi-Fi coverage, on-site classrooms and protective shelters against extreme weather. The pavilion will also provide clean drinking water and storage space for equipment. 

Young said planning for the facility started about six months ago. He said the facility will help students run experiments over time and collect data hands-on. 

The school also identified the pavilion as a fundraising goal for the University’s 40for40 challenge earlier this month, where donors were challenged to raise large sums of money within 40 hours. 

“(The Center is) a beautiful place to do field work out there,” Young said. “It’s a large land area in a part of the state that’s urbanizing very quickly, so we want to try to understand as much of the fragile landscapes and processes that are occurring.” 

Geosciences graduate student Daphne Smith said the pavilion would help increase student accessibility to fieldwork. She said the amenities of the pavilion — such as a bathroom and running water, neither of which are currently available — would make fieldwork in the outdoor learning center a more comfortable experience. 

“When we’ve recruited other people in the past to work on it too, you have to acknowledge the difficulties of working in the field,” Smith said. “That’s not for everyone, which is fair, but having better accessibility would definitely make it easier to recruit students to help with research and get more people involved.”