How I spent my summer vacation (part 1)
A lot of people think that university professors (and graduate students) get the summers “off”. We do! We hardly have any meetings about university business. We use the free time to catch up on the work that we are passionate about. I thought I would use the end of the summer to reflect on some of the highlights from my summer vacations and workcations.
In no particular order:
1. Meeting Latia and Demmetri, students from Virginia State University. These courageous souls came to NC State for the summer to gain experience in research. There were about a dozen students in the program, most from historically black colleges and universities. Most of them were forestry, biology, agriculture, or environmental sciences majors (including L and D). They were somehow convinced to spend the summer working with me to finish making the fourth installment of a community voice project in Milwaukee,
Wisconsin. L took the lead on learning Adobe Premier with no prior experience while D held her own in the transcription zone and picked up some new graphic design skills as she worked to construct the poster. In addition to working with me, they both ventures out for “tastings” of data collection with Dr. Aaron Hipp, Dr. Stacy Nelson, and many others in the CNR family. Which leads me to another highlight….
2. Finally getting some interview data from Lumberton post-Hurricane Matthew. Lumberton, NC is in Robeson County and it is unique in many ways. For the last six months, I have been working to put together grant proposals to do work on long-term recovery from Hurricanes using a just sustainability framework. The idea is that the mass disruption of Hurricanes can either trap communities or transform them and that disaster aid agencies, environmental managers, planners, and city officials would do well to know how to head toward (positive) transformation. I’m still working through the grand vision from a research standpoint, but I’ve been connecting with really wonderful people working locally. L and D needed to get off campus and talk to real-live humans if they were going to earn their environmental SOCIAL science badge this summer, so we headed to Lumberton to (a) shoot some b-roll and (b) talk to some people. There were several moments that stood out on the trip, but for me interviewing Angela and meeting folks living in the woods who wanted us to update them on the state of the Federal budget negotiations stood out as highlights.