Tensions running high, sleeplessness, putting in lots of hard work in and outside of class— seems like a typical November for UNC students. This week, we really began to feel the effects of the semester winding down, and as temperatures drop and time seems to speed up, let’s take a look back at all we accomplished this week.
On Monday, we headed to Internships as usual, with many Seniors registering for classes and Juniors registering later on Wednesday.
On Tuesday, after regular classes (Environmental Economics and Sustainable Coastal Management) in the morning, we had a visit from Dr. Lora Harris, self-proclaimed “carpet bagger” and “septic detector” coming to us from the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, Chesapeake Biological Laboratory. With Dr. Harris’ guidance, we spent a day and a half working on modeling and manipulating data. This first day was spent getting to know one another by participating in a trust-building exercise and to begin our thinking about how models are conceptualized.
When Wednesday rolled around, we continued to work with Dr. Harris to create model inputs and examine how this changed the outputs. This modeling experience and the data produced will hopefully be a useful tool for our Capstone’s data analysis portion. That evening, we attended the Science on the Sound lecture, where Dr. Harris went more in depth about her projects in the Potomac River working with nitrogen measurements and relating these findings to septic systems.
Rather than having Environmental Economics in the morning on Thursday, we took a trip down to a residential property in Nags Head to watch a septic field inspection done by Todd Krafft, environmental planner and septic health authority for the Town. Upon arriving in the resident’s backyard, Todd had already cleared away some earth from the less-dirty of two access points of the septic field. After removing the concrete covering, we were greeted by the all-too-characteristic, unpleasant odor associated with septic tanks and their failure. Todd explained mechanisms of filtration for these tanks, discussing the various ways that tanks can become functionally impaired and how to mitigate these problems.
We proceeded with the rest of the day, including regularly scheduled Coastal Management class and Ecology class. That evening, we each got to present about our internships to each other and also to some members of the CAB and representatives from internships. Hearing about everyone’s internships was a great way to get updated on what everyone has been up to this semester—we’ve all accomplished some pretty neat things (that can be read about in more detail in the coming internship blog posts)!
We attended our final ecology class on Friday morning (how has the semester already flown by?!) and then we used the rest of the day to work on the Human Dimensions portion of our capstone. We working on creating a unified codebook for our coding process, coming up with a succinct list that can be used to analyze our interview transcripts.
With five weeks left here on this beautiful little sandbar we call home, here’s to soaking up all that’s left to learn and to creating a capstone project that reflects all our hard work!
