Updata where I’m AT
It’s been a while. Post Chicago I have spent the summer so far at the idylic biostation in Northern Michigan working as a teacher’s assistant for Ecology…. Pellston, USA. As for my job here, between the prof and two TAs we have 21 students. My responsibilities truthfully are very few. The professor prefers to do most all the grading, so I help with a few labratory assignments, clean up the lab sometimes, sit through lectures and answer questions, help groups with field experiements when necesary… mostly what I do is that at the beginning of the year the class was divided into 5 teams to work on projects together, and I was assigned two of those teams. So I work with my “teams” as far as occasionally going into the field with them and trying to answer their questions. Honestly, mostly I’m learning that I don’t really want to TA this kind of class again, because I just don’t like sitting still through lectures, especially when I’ve already heard the information. It’s sad because they professor is really nice and very intelligent, but I just can’t pay attention all the time during lecture because I get to be hearing all sorts of stuff I know so well, and I space out….. and get fidgety….. lecture just isn’t my thing! On the positive side, there have been a few lectures about chemestry and stuff that I didn’t ever learn all that well, which have been very interesting and helpful. Plus all our group projects have to do with nitrogen cycling and isotope ratios, which is very interesting and especially helpful stuff for me to know, as a botanist. Plus…. not having too much work in ecology leaves me plently of time to do other stuff……
I’ve been going along with the algae class, which is awesome even though I don’t suppose I will really become an algae-ologist or anything like that. Class structure is perfect: about an hour of lecture in the morning followied by several hours of tramping around in bogs/lakes/fens/other wetlands and usually ending up going swimming or having algal fights and always eatting a picnic in some beautiful buggy place. The afternoon is spent at the microscope — at first this was hard on me to sit still so long as the microscope gave me a headache, but as I’ve learned more species and adjusted it’s getting easier and it’s so cool to see so much life and death and sex and predation and beautiful stuff all invisible to everyday life. Yesterday was the 5th annual algal derby: we divided into 3 teams and then the morning was spent collecting as much diversity as we could in 3 hours and the afternoon in the lab identifying in the microscope. Whichever team could identify the most correctly and least incorrectly and find the most phyla won. In the evening we took a boat over the one of the professor’s cabin on Douglass Lake and ate amazing food and had an award ceremony and ate algae shaped cookies and played algal charades (yeah, algae people are a little crazy). Anyways, it was really fun and definately inspires my interest in algae.
Also this summer I’ve been working a couple days a week at a local organic garden a few miles from the biostation. It’s just getting started at a commercial scale this year, so that’s pretty cool to see the methods they’re using and troubles they’re running into and all that. Also it’s just awesome to get out a few days a week and do some good ol’ physical work and get dirty and all.
Besides those “jobs” to keep me pretty busy, I have a few good friends, a dance club, lots of trails to run and bike on, a lake to swim in, an AWESOME roommate…. pretty great summer, definately.
What’s next? Chicago for a while and then….. Peru? Washington state? Argentina? The Dutch Antilles?