Goals

 This year has been difficult. My goals at this point are to do better every semester until I graduate. I'm hoping to focus on finding a position in my field in a year or two. My family could really use the income, and I could really use the experience. I'm hoping the experience will help me sort what I like to focus on next. I'm going to continue to work on my resume and see what opportunities I can find.

I suppose that the societal challenge that matters to me most right now is the toxicity in public discourse. I believe that the issue will be continue to be important forever. I think it can best be addressed by continually trying to do the best that we can to have better arguments where we seek to explore instead of tear each other down. I hope in the future that it becomes part of us to always speak as kindly as possible to one another. I'm very passionate about a number of societal issues though. Mass incarceration has been bothering me for some years now. There are so many things.

I'm so excited to be the first person in my family to graduate college. I hope that it might give the rest of my family to the confidence to know that it's an attainable and worthwhile goal. I feel fortunate all the time to have found my way to where I am. This year has been difficult, but I made it through, and I think it will get easier going forward. Everything is temporary. 

What I've Learned

Three years ago I didn't know anything about my field. No joke, I knew absolutely nothing. I knew that ecologists and scientists and whatnot existed and the most basic things about those professions. I was interested in climate and land use, but that means very little since I find that I am interested in just about everything. In fact, I was taking quite an interest at the time in sinkholes in Florida resulting from drawdown on the water table preceding rainfall events. So I had some interest in the topics, but I hadn't considered the professionals that were involved in obtaining the information for the topics. 

I suppose that what I have learned that I am most impressed with is the effectiveness of flexible environmental regulations. It totally sounds like a bad thing, and it can taken advantage of by ethically challenged systems, but it has also been used for us to make a continual effort to do better. We collect all kinds of information about hundreds of thousands of projects, and we require public input for a lot of things. It's fantastic. Just having the information helps to ensure that we have the tools to make the best decisions possible in the future. I love that. 

In the next 3 years, I hope to work on gaining some experience in my field. I'd like to see what some positions that actually use what I've been learning are like. After this summer, I plan on looking for positions that  are closely related to the kinds of things that I think that I might like to do long term in my career.

Gratitude and advise to younger self

 There are a myriad of people to whom I am grateful. In the context of my education and what I am trying to do right now, I am without a doubt most grateful to Dr Robin Cotter. She is one of the advisors to the STEAM Club at Phoenix College. She does about a million other things there as well, but I believe that the STEAM Club and Dr Cotter have been instrumental in giving me a place where I could be comfortable exploring science. It's all well and fine to tell someone that they can do something, but it is another thing entirely to create a space where that can be done without feeling self-conscious about what you do or don't already know or what you have or haven't already done. I could go on and on about the ways that Dr Cotter is wonderful, but what she has done for me is to encourage and listen to me and to answer my questions whenever and however she could. She actually pays attention to her students which is amazing because she is one of the hardest working people that I know, and the vast majority of that work is for her students. Because of her support, I am more likely to be brave about educational experiences, and I am more likely to see the potential value of participating in events and opportunities which is something that I have always sorely needed. People are more attracted to doing things in which they feel they can be successful. Dr Cotter has made me feel like I can be successful in my education in a way that I was not at all confident of before. I still have insecurities about what I want to do or how well I am doing, but the experiences that Dr Cotter encouraged me to participate in at Phoenix College have made a difference in what I do when I have those feelings.

If I was going to give my younger self advise, I would tell myself to make better use of my time. When I was younger, I don't think that I realized just how much free time I had. Now that I am older and I have a family, there is always something waiting to be done or that I know that I am getting behind on. I'm a little bit of a perfectionist, so sometimes I have a hard time picking something up that I know that I haven't done as well as I could or that I didn't do correctly in some way. Sometimes you just have to get it done and turn it in. This is still something that I repeat to myself all the time. I think that if I had understood it better when I was younger though that I might be better at it now given the extra time to reflect and work on it. I still get a little paralyzed when things start getting out of hand, but I keep moving. I just have to get it done.