Rust is currently a fifth-year PhD candidate at the State University of New York (SUNY) Binghamton, where he found the cultural expectations quite different. “I knew that the best course I could take in life is to do something I love, something I am good at, and something that could benefit the world,” he says.
Good grades at SDSMT helped him land a job with an NSF research collaborative studying how elements in the soil and water affect health on Pine Ridge. The Pine Ridge Reservation, where he spent so much time with his grandfather, also helped chart his path. “AISES is healing.” Attending AISES conferences energized him, and AISES provided scholarships and financial assistance for travel.Ī Gilman Scholarship sent Rust to Turkey, to study the relationship between geology and human health, which set him on the path toward environmental geochemistry. “AISES helped me in ways no other institution could ever hope to,” says Rust. He was involved in other student organizations, including AISES. “Every night was an all-nighter - for homework.” He found relief in the Tiospaye Program (“family” in Lakota), which offers academic support and financial assistance for Native students. The course load at SDSMT is notoriously challenging. “Friends would sneak me a slice of pizza from the dining hall to keep me from starving,” he says. His loans didn’t cover room and board, so he lived in his mother’s basement 20 miles away, often spending all his money on gas. At age 25 he applied to South Dakota School of Mines & Technology (SDSMT) and got in on his ACT math score. Without a credit-worthy cosigner for student loans, Rust had to postpone college until he could borrow on his own. I probably would have acquired some money but not fulfillment.” “If I had gone, I doubt I would have studied earth science. “That experience changed the entire trajectory of my life,” he says. Without the necessary GPA or letters of recommendation, going to college for computer science was no longer an option.
#TYLER RUST FULL#
Despite the perpetrator of the crime taking full responsibility and regardless of a parking lot always full of pickups with gun racks and loaded shotguns, Rust was expelled for “possession of explosives.” As Rust had never owned a gun, it must have belonged to the previous owner of the car. A single live bullet was found under the rear seat of his car. Rust was accused and offered a search of his vehicle to prove his innocence. But a few months before graduation, an acquaintance threw some fireworks into a car on campus. “I spent the greater portion of the year inside reading and trying to understand a world I felt detached from.” A counselor in high school encouraged Rust to go to college for computer science. Eventually Rust and his mother moved to Black Hawk, S.D.
When they were living with his mother’s parents, his grandfather taught him Lakota traditions and language. “From then on I had a persistent yearning to understand myself and my place in the universe,” he says. As a boy he camped in the Badlands with his grandfather, studying the astonishing formations and fossils. For Tyler Rust, the Black Hills region of South Dakota was a natural geology lab.
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