This week was a little different than normal, because it was the week before fall break! Usually our weeks are jam packed, but this time we just had two school days before we had time off. However, our week started off as it always does, with us going to our various internships on Monday. My internship this semester is with The Nature Conservancy at Nags Head Woods preserve. My role primarily involves being out on the trails and maintaining them, so there is a lot of variety. I help take care of invasive species, keep up with the trail counters, and do general maintenance tasks like raking. This Monday I worked on setting up a new trail counter to put out in the entrance area. The trail counters are important because they gather population data, which is useful information for funding purposes. Setting up the new trail counter involved hooking it up to the computer and selecting the programming that we wanted. I also helped gather milkweed seeds for the butterfly garden. That task turned out to be even trickier than setting up the trail counter because the seeds were so small!
After our internships on Monday we had a Community Advisory Board meeting, where we updated everybody about our capstone progress so far. We just finished making our pivot tables for our data, and creating graphs that gave us variable summaries. We also began work on our research paper, and completed a draft of our intro section. Our project is coming along, but we still have a long way to go! The board members had a lot of good suggestions for how to get our survey more widely distributed. The food at the CAB meeting was delicious as always, and this time it was Indian food. My favorite part of the CAB meetings is that we get to take the leftovers home, and then I don’t have to cook for a few days.
This time I had my pick of the leftovers because everybody went home for fall break! I chose to stay at the guest house because my little sister came to visit. It had been a long time since I had last seen her, so it was very exciting. I got to take her to see all of the OBX sights. We went all over the place, with both of our favorite places being Jeannete’s Pier, the Christmas Store, and Proof Bakery (although Duck Donuts also gets an honorary mention). It’s still warm enough to enjoy the beach, and so one day we took our books and went and read at Jeanette’s for a while! I’ve also really enjoyed some of the YMCA classes while I’ve been here, and so I took her to the zumba class with me. My favorite zumba instructor there is Renee, and my sister liked her class as well. It was odd having a quiet house during fall break! Usually there is so much commotion going on. However it was nice to get a chance to relax. Our weeks have been so busy lately, and it was nice to take a pause before the even busier weeks ahead!
