First of all, hello! Welcome. Thank you for spending the time to read about this brief but exhilarating adventure I am about to embark on. My name is Lindsey and I’m a third year studying Ecology, Behavior and Evolution at UCLA. What do I want to do with that may you ask? I’m not entirely sure, but more on that later. This quarter I am partaking in a course in which students plan and carry out research on a subject of their choice in a tropical rainforest in southeastern Nicaragua.

Since I have known that I would be participating in this program I’ve been showered with questions from friends and family. Where exactly will you be? What are you going to be researching? Is this something you want to pursue after college? The intimidating reality that came about was that my answer to most questions was “I have no idea.” I knew the general area we would be traveling to, Refugio Bartola in Nicaragua, but what exactly that area consists of I was unsure. As for the research, our course is set up where we pick, as individuals or groups, a study topic or organism that we then get to collect data on in the field for three weeks. This can be exhilarating but overwhelming to think about. Tropical rainforests are the most biodiverse environments on earth; how am I to choose just one organism to study? And as for the question that I have been asked infinitely since I was a kid, “What do you want to do when you grow up?” or as I see it “What in the world do you want to do with your life when you graduate college?” It is a daunting thought. I currently think I want to go into environmental management, but this trip will hopefully give me some much welcomed insight into what field research is like and if this could be something I could spend my life being passionate about.

After months of being filled with the questions of others and my own, here we are at the present day and a majority of those questions have, to which I am very thankful, been answered. I will be staying close to the border of Costa Rica along the Rio San Juan. What I am going to study has yet to be decided, but I will be creating two separate research projects of which I will plan throughout the next few weeks, possibly even while at the site. There is so much that I am looking forward to in the coming months. I don’t often think much about my surroundings, I’ve lived in California my entire life, but there are so many other environments out there that I cannot even begin to imagine. I am going to travel to a place 100% different than Los Angeles, full of different species that are utterly new to me, and that excites me.