Week Fourteen: November 24 - 30

Monday was the last day of my practicum. L was sick with the flu, so it was just me and Brian finishing up the last of the mesocosms. We also did some data analysis of our salamanders, which was much less scary than I had feared. It seems that there's pre-made tools in R to just spit out all the mark-recapture stats we needed! Finally, we wrapped up with making some screen-printed t-shirts - two for me, two for L. They're already some of my new favorite things!

Tuesday was only a half-day of class before they kicked us out for Thanksgiving break. Each case study group did their Conservation X presentation; essentially a short pitch of one of the strategies they came up with to address their key issue, with the idea that we were presenting it to potential investors for a budget of 5 million dollars. It doubled as practice for our final case study presentations, which was nice. Even though we were short our OE expert (poor L), we did a pretty good job of explaining our plan to fund more monarch research and create a database to share more accurate information.

Next week will be finals, and then after that it's just final presentations. It feels so weird to be basically done with the semester. I feel a bit like it all just started, but we've done so much! At the start of the semester, I couldn't have told you how to determine the sex of a red-backed salamander, or how to create an adaptive management plan, or how to cryopreserve sperm properly. I definitely wouldn't have been as well-versed on conservation issues as I am now. Even the things that I came in knowing about, like stakeholder analysis and engagement, I feel like I've gained a much deeper and more nuanced understanding of. Working through so many different case studies, having in-depth discussions about policy and its impacts, and getting out in the field to get our hands dirty... all of it has really helped expand my knowledge of what conservation is - but more importantly, of what it does and how it does that.

I'm excited for my next semester, of course, but I think this fall is going to be one of those big, life-changing highlights that you look back at after 10 years and go 'Yeah, that's where this started'. I've been incredibly lucky to have a couple of those already, and I expected this to be one of them, but it's still so different to be standing on the other side of it now. This semester has been everything I could have hoped for and more. It's hard to imagine what little I have left of undergrad topping this, honestly. But I also came out of this with a more concrete plan of where I'm going next, and I think that future looks pretty bright, too. I'm excited to see where I end up, and what I learn next.