Outstanding Student...

I was honored to receive two awards recently: Outstanding Graduate Student Award and Outstanding Graduate Teaching Assistant Award. 

I am now in the second year of my Ph.D. program. My project has come a long way and is now fairly succinct with three separate parts that will combine to answer one main question. 

Fieldwork has begun earlier this year with the warmer-than-usual March. My biggest problem right now is protecting my field equipment from rodents. In the past, we haven't had to deal with this on the scale that we do now. So far rodents have done about $1200 worth of damage via chewing and severing wires. I am constructing armor for the equipment, so I hope that solves the problem and that I can get more complete data sets as a result! So, hopefully fieldwork goes smoothly this summer. 

I am looking forward to hearing back about the Dissertation Improvement NSF Grant I submitted. I am obviously hoping to get it, but if not, the feedback will be nice.  The feedback will hopefully benefit my project and help improve my grant proposal, so I can resubmit it in October.

I have also taken on a new commitment for the next three years - hopefully they will keep me on for the entire program! NIU has recently received an NSF grant to fund a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU). This year we have five interdisciplinary projects and 7 NSF REU participants and 12 total participants. I am the Graduate Student REU Coordinator and so far it has been fun coordinating all the logistics. I am looking forward to meeting the participants come June 17th. 

More adventures to come, I'm sure.

PhD here I come...Fall 2010

The second semester after my graduation has begun. I've officially applied to the new PhD program at NIU within the Geography department! Hopefully I will be working, in part, with the Nature Conservancy here in IL on Oak Savannah restoration and research.

I'm continuing to teach here at NIU until I begin the program (hopefully Fall 2010). This semester I teach 3 courses: Geog 101 - Survey of Physical Geography, Geog 256/556 online - Intro to maps and mapping, and Geog 359/557 - Intro to GIS. This week will be our second week meeting. I'm excited, because this is the first semester I feel prepared enough in advance that I can breathe between lectures and assignments. I've always been able to keep up, but I've found that it truly does take a few years of experience, gathering info/examples and redesigning lectures based on how they preformed to really find your niche.

I'm excited to teach an online course this semester since it has allows me to explore new teaching strategies and will provide me overall experience in a variety of teaching realms. I've also been able to learn about and incorporate fun technology into that and other courses. For example, my newest find has been Wimba (Pronto & Classroom) which integrates very well with the student course site: Blackboard. For now, I am experimenting and familiarizing myself with the program by using it primarily for my Online office and providing them with an Online student lounge/study room. I will hopefully be able to branch out and use it more extensively in the future as I become more familiar and comfortable with it.

Prepping my first online course has gone smoothly so far, because I was lucky enough to receive amazing tips from another Faculty member who has lots of online teaching experience (Thanks, Tonya!). I feel much more comfortable about the structure of the class and eager to see how the technology will hopefully improve their overall experience with online learning. I've also tried to integrate a bit of it into my face to face classes, so hopefully its a great experiences all around.

We'll see how it goes.

Master of Science

It's official, my thesis was accepted! I've graduated. Next step, instructor until who knows...??!!