Greetings! My name is Michelle and I am a third year Ecology, Behavior, and Evolution major hoping to double major in Geography and Environmental Studies. I am so so so excited for the Field Biology Quarter and I can’t wait to get hands-on experience in the field.

Sitting in our small classroom, it’s hard to imagine that we’ll be in an entirely new country and biome in just a few short weeks. The more pictures we look at and the more books and papers we read, the more excited I get. I can’t shake this feeling that this experience will be extraordinary. There’s so much I want to learn, so much I want to see, and so much that I have yet to anticipate.

 One of my goals this quarter is to learn something new every single day. It’s a simple goal, but I’m hoping that it will remind me to really appreciate this experience and absorb as much as I can. At the current rate of our readings and lectures, learning new things hasn’t been a problem thus far and I can’t imagine that will be much of a challenge once we’re in the field. I think one of my greatest worries is putting the actual papers together. I’m eager for the experience, but I’m also really nervous about planning and carrying out a real project and assembling ideas, data, and conclusions into one solid paper. From what I’ve learned and seen so far, papers are the bread and butter in the field of science – a field I desperately want to be a part of.

I am so humbled by my current position in this course and I feel incredibly lucky. For ten weeks I get to learn from the environment, professors, and my fellow FBQers. After taking seemingly endless classes with gung-ho pre-med students, it’s an incredible feeling to be surrounded by like-minded students interested in wildlife, fieldwork, and conservation. I can already feel a buzz of anticipation and curiosity in this group. I don’t know how this little room will be able to contain our growing excitement in the coming weeks. We already have to crack open the windows.