Speaking to the Community

As a student, it is very easy to get wrapped up in learning the basic material for a single class and then forgetting everything you’ve learned to make space for the next semester.  Not seeing the connections of each class and how to use the information you have just learned and use it for a completely different situation.  A lot of people in my classes will complain about having to take a history course when their major is Mathematics.  But having this kind of information is always useful for real life applications.  To connect to other people outside of your class or major or even university.  One of the main reasons why I was so excited to be accepted as a LAKES intern was because of the interdisciplinary research we all would be conducting.  Although I wasn’t 100% sure what that would look like; I didn’t know what a social science experiment looked like until I got here. 

This past week I have mainly been recording daily data points and looking more into the circuitry of my experiment.  But those two things do not usually take up that much time, so I was able to assist the other intern groups on their projects.  The last two Saturdays I went with Monica and Elle to various boat launches to help them with their social science experiment.  Their group is surveying the people who use the surrounds lakes the most to try and quantify the value of the lakes.  Through their surveys they are looking to see if there is a difference in lake attendance if people know the lake quality is good or bad.  The days that I went, when the community members were told the lake quality it did not seem to matter to them.  In fact, the more color the lake had the more optimistic they were that there would be a good catch that day; which I found pretty interesting.  It was nice talking with the lake users; a handful said they had been coming to the lake for over 20 years. 

                The way I see this project relating to mine is through the community members.  While Elle and Monica are physically going out and surveying folks on what they think about the lake and the water quality; my working with the MFCs and the circuitry will be a way for the community members to benefit from the lake.  I plan on creating a user-friendly app that people can use to measure the water temperature of the lake as well as see that the electricity emitting from certain places.  This will remind them that there is a phosphorus problem in their lakes and that they should be trying their best to get educated on the topic in order to fix it.