First Day of School

Well, all fifty minutes of my Monday classes are over and I've been slaving over a presentation for a few hours in the student union (about 70% of that time was spent procrastinating....like blogging and Facecreeping). Working on this presentation made me think I should write a little about what I'm doing here in Idaho. Also, then I can look back in four years and say wow, I was so naive.

Campus! That is the library on the right.

So, this year I will be going to classes at the University of Idaho and then will be moving to Costa Rica to do research in the summer. I'll get to CR as soon as I can and take a Spanish immersion course because my Espanol is a biiiit rusty. Then, after one more year of classes in Idaho, I will relocate to CR for two full years of research!

My Costa Rica campus!

The program is called IGERT- Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship. I am working with four other teammates to produce a study with both disciplinary and interdisciplinary aspects. We are an economist, a landscape ecologist, a hydrologist, a social scientist, and an entomologist. The region we are working in is called Hojancha, and its in the Nicoya Peninsula (south CR, on the West Coast.) The community there is incredible and they have been working for 35 years to improve farming methods, reforest land, and enhance livelihoods. We are going in to learn more about how the different economic incentives have made a difference in the region. My part will be related to studying biodiversity, using insects as an indicator species between different land use/land management types.

Four of the team plus my adviser.

Now I am off to go for a jog and get a bunch of my stuff from the guys' house. I have already started leaving all of my junk at their place, isn't that awesome!? Bffs.