Due to the 4th of July this week, things were relatively quiet in terms of the directed activity towards work, our Monday meeting was cancelled, Susan was off on vacation (hope she had fun), and I ended up spending the week in New Jersey, staying with some friends from school who lived there.
That said, there are quite a few big, exciting things on the horizon, for one, the Esri User’s conference coming up next week (I will be filling you in on the ones I attended next week)! All sorts of cool seminars on mapping software, with the goal of demonstrating some of the major benefits and powers of the modern GIS technology, from finding creative symbology to represent spatial data, to working with 3D map visualizations, to discussions on how to use some of the more nuanced parts of the ArcGIS toolkit. I’m really looking forwards to it! In addition to getting ready for the conference, Kelly suggested I sat in on the GG Lead National team meeting on Friday the 8th, to discuss how we might divide and conquer, there is only so many seminars that one person can attend, right? To my dismay, this meeting also got postponed due to some difficulties of attendance by some of the members, regardless, A list of the seminars of interest was sent out to each of the members (myself included), with a brief description on the content of each session, and how it could be useful in curriculum development with youth. But, I’m getting ahead of myself, what else was I up to this week? 
Do you remember the Fluorescence project?! Well I was hard at work this week, reading up on the resources that Susan had forwarded to the team in box, and then synthesizing some of the information that I read from those resources, into a coherent plan for a potential youth curriculum that we’d be putting on later this fall. The main goal of this assignment is for me to figure out how we might incorporate the property in plants known as Solar Induced Fluorescence (SIF) with Geospatial Mapping concepts, so my current outline involves a blend of activities with geocaching, chlorophyll extraction, map-making, painting, and of course, as much of the cool science that goes along with it as we can fit into a day. I ended up presenting this in the Thursday check in meeting, and in the next week or so, I’m planning on doing some of the experiments and activities myself, in order to get a sense for how realistic my plan is. Pretty exciting stuff!
Aside from all that, my summer courses definitely picked it up a notch in the past few days, I had some prelims alongside the usual hefty workload, as well as the obviously stressful process of driving to and from NJ on my plate, so I’m looking forwards to getting back to Ithaca where I’ll be able to get my typical routine back on track.
I’ll catch y’all next week!
-Rob