Well, it’s all over. The final report is submitted and the course is finished. To be honest, I was dreading this project from the beginning of the course, but it was actually really gratifying to see an entire semester’s worth of work come together in a project I was quite proud of.
Thankfully, my experimental design ended up being quite headache free. I didn’t have to make any major changes to my sampling methods or experimental design. What I did have to do was grapple with the weather. I got snowed on, rained on, and thoroughly annoyed my partner when I managed to convince her to come trudge through puddles with me and count berries on bushes.
This project gave me an appreciation for the physical challenges faced by ecologists that other scientific disciplines don’t necessarily have to deal with outside of their air conditioned labs. It also gave me an appreciation for how hard it is to design a good hypothesis and experiment, and how much work goes into even what seems like simple data. I put hours and hours into a project that I was proud of, but also a project that ultimately was only a small step towards figuring out the root of the pattern I was originally observing.
Overall I think this course was a really great learning experience, and the project went from an original dread to an actual course highlight!