First off, let me say that the Nissan Leaf is pretty awesome! My professor just bought one and took us for a ride after our lunch lab meeting today. Its SO quiet! and he said that it has plenty of power as he took us speeding up the hill. I know what I want for Christmas!!
Another one of the questions that I get is, "How did you come to this conservation psychology?? Its so unique/interesting!" Well my path to conservation is rather convoluted so I will attempt to lay out my interest in it here.
I initially went into IWU wanting to get a private practice so I had a double major of psych and business. I was going along seeing what psychology had to offer when I took a stats class from Dr. Kunce. She was interested in mixing environmental topics into her stats lectures and I thought that was really neat, since I had always been pro environment.
One thing that is phenomenal about IWU was May term. This allows students for the month of May the option to take a class, travel to take a class, or not take a class and go home or work. Freshman year I took a multiculturalism class in Hawaii. the end of sophomore year for may term I decided to take an environmental studies class in the UK. This class really heightened my interest in the environmental studies department.
In the meantime I absolutely hated the business department at IWU the classes were boring, the department head was uninterested and the teachers were nothing special (with the extreme exception of my Investments Professor Pana, she was the saving grace of the department) (I also really enjoyed my econ class with Professor Smith, but I'm not sure if Econ falls under the business dept). So when I got back from being abroad for a semester in Ireland I dropped business as a major, made it a minor, and added environmental studies as my second minor.
When I came back from Ireland I lost my motivation a bit, I had been living on my own in an apartment in the awesome city of Dublin, and I REALLY just wanted to be done with school and be out on my own again. I took on more shifts at work after my back healed and started trying to save money to pay off the ever mounting IWU student loans.
Until one day I was in Dr. Kunce's office and she asked me about grad school interests and she pretty much said, go to grad school. I REALLY respect her opinion so what she says goes! She helped me look into what was going on in the field of conservation psychology and told me to check out that field.
Ultimately I found Professor Schultz out at CSUSM and fell in love with the program. So many of his research interests lined up with mine so I applied there. there was a letter of rec hiccup so I didnt get in initially and stuck around in blo-no for a year. I started management training at RL and was on the green team in the interim.
applied again at the end of 2010 and was accepted for the 2011 school year. which is where I now am!
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