iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Mark Marley @markmarley.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Good luck to Jessica Watkins on her ride up to the space station this morning. I still have her final project ppt on my laptop from when she took the "What Makes a Habitable Planet?" course I co-taught at Stanford with Jack Lissauer.

Title slide for a ppt deck, "Solar System Volcanism; Jessica Watkins; November 19, 2009; GES 122"

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Mark Marley @markmarley.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Possibly lifetime best student review of a class I taught.

I actually came into my undergraduate with the intent of being a mechanical engineering major. I found after a bit of time that that wasn’t my passion. It wasn’t something that I was super interested in, wasn’t interested in doing for the rest of my career. But it was something that I thought that I kind of needed to do in order to be an astronaut or to keep the door open for becoming an astronaut. It was really kind of at that crossroads where there were a couple of really interesting courses with titles like, ‘What Makes a Habitable Planet,’ ‘Planetary Materials.’ And I looked up and I said, ‘Whatever that is, that’s what I want to do.’ That was in the geology department. And so I signed up for my first geology class. And it was love at first class. From then on that passion just grew, as I continued in my career.

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Mark Marley @markmarley.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I've seen her say in other interviews that the thing she remembered most from the class was the lectures on Mars and those were all given that year by Virginia Gulick. So at least we had the right guest speaker.

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