exciting and edgy upcoming adventure!

This is pretty exciting news!

After a bit of panic about what courses to take this semester and what direction my thesis work might take, I landed a really sweet field research gig for a chunk of the summer. My advisor, Laura Schneider, had mentioned offhandedly in the past that she might be happy to bring me onto her research, the EDGY project in the southern Yucatan peninsula in Mexico. She looks at land use change, among other things, but a lot of the foundation work for the project includes biogeography and soil stuffs.

She needs someone to do some vegetation mapping for her this summer. She was going to hire someone down there, but then remembered that I might be having a panic attack about my thesis by now, and am interested in this sort of thing and have a small amount of experience in it, too. The conversation went thusly:

"Do you have a driver's license?"
"Yes."
"Can you drive stick shift?"
"YES!"
"Then we would really like you to come to Mexico with us."

Fully funded, at least three weeks of wandering around forests in the Southern Yucatan, near the borders of Guatemala and Belize, with Mayan ruins in the middle of the field site. I'll be driving a truck they have down there, exploring the area and what's growing in it (specifically looking for the bracken fern but making note of the other plantlife, too).

!!!

More to come in the months following. We'll talk more as the end of the semester draws nearer. Meanwhile, I'm going to continue to jump up and down a bit about this.