SAS

A few days ago, I sent away my application for the short term voyage for Semester at Sea. The voyage is based around the Millennium Developmental Goals and engineering new ways to obtain an equitable and sustainable future. The application required an essay about how the voyage goals correspond with my career goals. When I sat down and thought about it, I realized just how much every profession can be related back to the environment and sustainability in some way or another. Being a nursing major, I had a lot of ideas but chose to wrote about the overuse of research and fabrication of synthetic drugs, rather than researching and discovering new, natural drugs. I believe some of my thought process came from the field trip to ECHO, and specifically, the Neem and Moringa tree which had numerous health benefits. This topic has been on my mind ever since, and I plan to research the topic and write and Honors scholarship competition abstract about it. I find it very interesting.

poisonous?

Last night, my roommate and I were walking along the backside of our dorm, which faces the FGCU lake, and came across a coiled up snake at the bottom of the stairs. It was a skinny snake and as it uncoiled and slithered away, we realized just how long it was. For being so skinny, the snake was probably at least 3 feet long. My roommate was freaking out because she automatically said it was poisonous because it had yellow on it... and she's an environmental major. However, I am pretty sure that just because a snake is red, yellow, and black, doesn't mean it is poisonous, but matters on the order of the colors. I would have liked to have know for sure by looking at the color order, but it was too dark to tell and it slithered away.

Meal time

I love FGCU's campus. There are so many opportunities to interact with the environment and wildlife. As I was leaving campus the other day, a hawk (or at least I think it was a hawk) soared over the bushes surrounding the pond then over all of the cars. It had just caught a nice meal of fish and was clenching the fish in it's talons. These are the events that I like to see happen. It makes being on campus so much more enjoyable when there is wildlife all around you.

oil spill

Tomorrow marks the 6 month anniversary of the BP oil spill. For this anniversary, a group on campus is going to have a flash mob oil spill to voice our opinion that we have not forgotten and it is not okay. Only a fraction of the oil was ever recovered. This is also not okay. Couldn't they have loaded huge barrels of hay into the oil slicks? After all, oil is attracted to and soaked up by the hay, which can them be scooped up much easier than oil.

Anyways, for the event tomorrow, there will be a "human oil spill" consisting of many students all dressed in black, which is then "cleaned up" by people dressed as BP executive with brooms. The even takes place 2 hours before colloquium class and I hope much of our class will participate in it. I will see how it goes tomorrow.

State of the World

Today, I am going to try to figure out ideas on how my group should present our State of the World chapter to the class. It was a pretty interesting read, about advertising and creating a world in which the onlookers can picture themselves in. I think we should do some sort of game or activity that involves the whole class; something fun to keep the interest up. I just haven't figured out what that should be yet. We do have a week still to come up with something though, so we will think of it.

Haunted Walk

Last weekend, and for the next 2 weekends, there is a haunted walk on campus in the nature trail. When helping to set up, a long black snake slithered in front of me and into the nearby brush. It really scared me, especially since I was in the middle of the trail with no one around. I like the concept of the haunted walk. Just being out in the trail, surrounded by woods, in complete darkness makes it so much more frightening than it really is. What is it that makes nature so scary? Is it just because it is not familiar? I think so.

ECHO

So far, ECHO has been my favorite of the field trips. The concept of the organization is very beneficial and the tour was very interesting. I liked being able to try different edible leaves.

Oak Creek

This past Saturday, Kelly, Vanessa, and I went to the Oak Creek clean-up with the ECO-Action Service team to do our 5 service learning hours for Colloquium. We actually had a lot more fun than we thought we would canoeing around picking up garbage. Even though I already did my 5 hours, I think I will go on other ECO-action trips.

October

I just wanted to say how I love October weather. I feel as if every year on October 1st, the weather realizes that is now October and magically drops 10 degrees. It is cool and breezy, but still sunny. It is perfect weather. I also find it amazing how weather can affect your mood so much. October weather makes me incredibly happy.