AAG & Presentation

Hello Everyone!

So as you may have read from my last blog post, last week I had the opportunity to attend the annual meeting of the American Association of Geographers (AAG) in Boston! Unfortunately, I was sick last week so I was only able to attend on the Friday but I'm very glad that I was able to attend one day out of the five day conference!

Brittney and I at the conference

It was quite the experience! The conference was spread out between the Hynes Convention Center, the Copley Marriott hotel and the Sheraton hotel so there was a lot going on! I went with my friend Brittney and her dad and we were able to attend 2 presentations. The first talk that we went to was given by climate scientist, James Hansen. It was really interesting to hear him talk about how the future generation can battle climate change and help to make changes to reduce our carbon footprint and global warming. I had been really interested in hearing him speak because I had written about him in a paper for my Climatology course at Bridgewater a couple years back. He was awarded the "Honorary Geographer" title by the AAG.

We also attended a talk on the extinction of animals. It was a panel presentation so there were two professors speaking and one graduate student. One professor was from France and he spoke about the extinction of animals and zoos, the other professor was from SUNY and she spoke about the extinction of Corals. The graduate student spoke about a research project that she was in the middle of completing about fish in the Rocky Mountains and how some species of trout are losing their "pure genetics" because they are breeding with different fish species. She talked about how they are using some type of piscicide to kill off the invasive fish species. I personally did not agree with this as they are poisoning the fish and potentially contaminating the water with chemicals that could be harmful to humans or other species of animals.

 

Overall, I was definitely glad that I was able to attend the conference. Definitely bummed that I wasn't feeling well enough to attend more of the conference. Hopefully it will be in Boston again and I'll be able to go or maybe I'll be able to travel to the conference elsewhere another time.

 

In other news...today I was invited to speak to the GIS II class at BSU on how far I've come from learning GIS in the classroom to applying it in the real world at my internship. It was an inspirational and motivational talk of sorts to get the students to consider applying for internships in a field that they want to pursue a career. I will be forever grateful for my time here at the North Attleboro Electric Department and I will miss my coworkers when I leave April 28th to start my new adventure elsewhere.

I hope that everyone has a happy & healthy week!