Hi, I\u2019m Caleb, an ecology student here at UCLA. It\u2019s still a bit surreal for me to think about the fact that in just a few weeks, I\u2019ll be traveling up a river in a remote rainforest to build my research skills. Besides seeming like something from a childhood dream, there are few things I enjoy more than being immersed in nature and asking \u201cwhy\u201d \u2013 it\u2019s the reason I\u2019ve wanted to be a biologist since as early as I can remember. So it might be a bit of understatement to say that I\u2019m excited and grateful for this opportunity – I\u2019m sure that so many things that I can\u2019t even anticipate await me there.<\/p>\n
A big reason why I want to do this is that I\u2019ve been doing research for the past few years now, but mostly from the perspective of treating ecological phenomena as some abstract idealization on a computer or in some equations. Although I find theory fascinating, it\u2019s hard not to feel as though there\u2019s something missing in my scientific education when I\u2019ve never actually formulated and tested ideas that were generated by my own primary observations of the natural world. I guess you could say I feel like an armchair ecologist. This really struck me last year while reading Ernst Mayr\u2019s \u201cThe History of Biological Thought\u201d \u2013 repeatedly, I saw examples of how, since the origins of biological inquiry, movement away from direct observation into the realm of abstract reasoning has been a slippery slope, often leading to dead ends at best and harmful distractions at worst. That really made me start to think more seriously about the consequences of this significant gap in my training \u2013 a gap which I hope this time in Nicaragua will begin to fill in. Spending every waking moment surrounded by seemingly boundless biodiversity and getting my hands off the keyboard and my eyes and ears into the tropical rainforest will, I hope, inspire me and teach me to develop better ideas of how things are working around me in nature<\/em>, rather than in abstract models of nature, and how to address and test these ideas in an empirically rigorous fashion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Hi, I\u2019m Caleb, an ecology student here at UCLA. It\u2019s still a bit surreal for me to think about the fact that in just a few weeks, I\u2019ll be traveling up a river in a remote rainforest to build my research skills. Besides seeming like something from a childhood dream, there are few things I … Continue reading Out of the Armchair and into the Jungle<\/span>