I really enjoyed this class and our senior project. The assignments were well organized, and the project portion was a great experience for future jobs. In the future, my career may involve working with raw data. As a result, analyzing environmental data was certainly worthwhile. I also significantly improved my presentation skills, including my writing techniques. I loved how we could visit the job sites and see first-hand how the fog collectors were installed and how to service them. As a person using a power wheelchair, it was awesome and rewarding to have the sense that I can collaborate with other colleagues in the field.
Primarily, I loved how the journal reviews and class assignments were necessary steps for developing the final project and report. I experienced little to no writing anxiety because writing the final report was like a large literature review. The second reason why the literature reviews were helpful was when it was time to insert citations for articles, having short blurbs of long articles was a quick way to access my citations.
For group work, I learned to completely trust my peers and become accustomed to everyone’s work habits. It is also great to share the writing with my group. I was not stressed about writing the report because I knew that the final paper was a collaborative effort. Bouncing ideas and suggestions off the group was great for me for several reasons. First, sharing ideas was great for my confidence regarding formulating ideas through writing. Second, presenting ideas to the class helped me build up my confidence around sharing ideas. Something I would do differently for the capstone is I would have been more relaxed with my group and trust them more. I was too concerned about making deadlines.
Supporting our community entities with tracking fog data and setting up fog collectors allowed me to get a sense of what a job in the concentration of sustainable communities would be like. This project has helped train me with the necessary tools to coherently analyze environmental issues and data. For the sustainable community emphasis in the environmental studies major at California state University Monterey Bay, I learned to recommend sustainable ideas for communities’ environmental goals.
Gus Albertsen 