At last week’s annual meeting of the Geological Society of New Zealand, the PALs (and our friends from the PORO lab) had quite the showing! Icing on beautiful presentations by all were two prizes for runner-up student presentations. James Clarke presented his work on laboratory analogues of volcano-seismic signals, and Jonathan Simpson reported on the setup he built for laser ultrasound under pressure to explore anisotropy and fracturing in Alpine Fault Rocks. To top the awards off, Shreya Jagdish Kanakiya won the Jim Ansell award, “awarded by the Committee of the Geoscience Society of New Zealand (Inc.) to the applicant whose subsequent career, in the opinion of the Committee, is the most likely to advance geophysics in New Zealand.” No pressure, Shreya!