Day 2: Environmental Journalism.

Hey everyone, happy Monday!

So today, I thought I'd share what I've been working on in my Environmental Journalism class with you all. This class has been one of my favorites this semester not only because I am interested in the topic, but because Professor Williams makes the class that much better. His teaching style and enthusiasm about the environmental journalism field really brings the class to life for me and reinvigorates my interest in the topic that much more. It's a great MJD elective class for those of you who may be interested or need an elective to take!

For my final project, I made a blog about wind power in Vermont and the controversy surrounding it. I'm sure that for many of you, you likely share the same opinion that I did going into this project. Wind power sounds like a great alternative energy source that doesn't require a lot of production to make, so what could possibly be wrong with it? As I found out, there's actually a lot more controversy surrounding it than one would think, and many of these controversies stem from environmental, economic, and health-related issues.

Windmills on the Lowell Mountain ridge line in Vermont.

A breakdown of windmill statistics in Vermont.

While it's true that wind energy doesn't cost a lot to produce and doesn't have nearly the same environmental impact as fossil fuels or other mainstream sources of energy, it still has its flaws as well. I talked to a Vermont state senator, a representative from Green Mountain Power, a a few other people from around the state about the issue, and they all brought to light some things I never knew about wind power. Industrial-sized windmills, like many of the projects in Vermont, have the potential to disrupt wildlife patterns in the area as well as decrease property value for those who live near them. Furthermore, there has been talk that the acoustics of windmills cause those who live close to them to suffer from constant headaches and nosebleeds, effectively forcing them to move if their health becomes worse.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that wind power is bad altogether. On the contrary, I think that wind power has some amazing benefits and could work in Vermont wonderfully as long as it is established correctly. These industrial-sized projects seem to be the main issue in my opinion. Many of these projects are built this way because ridge lines are where most wind comes from, and so the grand size of the windmills in these locations allows for the most wind power to be harnessed. However, I think that if the state were to invest in several smaller wind projects rather than these industrial-sized ones, it would be a bit more costly, but it would create the same benefits while reducing environmental, economic, and health impacts.

Clearly, I am very interested in this topic and I learned a lot from my research. It was surreal to talk to some big names in Vermont about this topic, and this class has been a rewarding experience. Writing in a journalistic style has been a challenge for me since starting the MJD major as well, but this class has really helped me to develop these writing skills.

If you want to check out my final project on wind power, click here!

The One Week Challenge.

This weekend has been very busy to say the least. From having drill to balancing homework and finals coming up, I've been burnt out and exhausted more than ever. That being said, I decided to give myself a little challenge since the semester is coming to an end so soon, and that is this: one new post every day for a week straight. Do you think I can do it? I'm not so sure, but I think it's worth trying!

Every day, I'm going to try to find something to share with you guys relating to Saint Michael's or my life in some way, shape, or form that isn't entirely boring (I'll try my best with this, I promise). To kick this off, I thought I'd talk about coming back from Thanksgiving break with my roommate and best friend Jesse.

Roommate selfie!

Jesse has been my roommate and best friend ever since I started going to Saint Michael's. We also happen to be taking a class together for the first time since we went to high school together this semester, which has been a blast and probably won't ever happen again since he's a Psychology major and I'm a Business Administration and MJD double-major.

When we got back from Thanksgiving break, I think we had both had enough of the home life and were more than ready to get back into school mode. But of course, since break had just ended, we had to spend our last night of freedom playing video games and hanging out all night, which was a night of relaxation and a vacation from homework that I needed desperately.

Luckily for me, Jesse will be attending Saint Michael's for a semester after I graduate due to the fact that he had to miss a semester for his Navy training, so I'll be able to visit and be on campus a little bit longer! It'll be weird being an alumni I'm sure, but hopefully I adjust quickly.

So, I don't really know what the point of this post was, as you can probably tell. Maybe I just wanted to express how thankful I am to have an awesome best friend, since it's the season for that sort of thing. Maybe I just wanted to do something more fun than homework, so I decided to write this post. Whatever the case may be, I'm just thankful to have great friends like Jesse around me all the time to make my Saint Mike's experience that much better.

Thanksgiving, Snow, Break, Life.

Happy Sunday! I hope you're all feeling as reinvigorated from this break as I am. This is the first time Saint Michael's has ever given a whole week off for Thanksgiving break, and needless to say I caught up on some much needed sleep. I also managed to do a good amount of work over break as well, so I'm feeling a little less stressed as we're coming toward the end of the semester in three weeks. How is it December tomorrow already?

Let's ditch that thought for now. I don't like to think about how graduation is coming.

On a brighter note, Thanksgiving with my family was a great time. My mom and dad had their best friends from work and their daughters come and join us, so we had about ten people including my Aunt and Grandma who also came. The food was amazing of course, and the fact that it was snowing on Thanksgiving made it even better.

My Thanksgiving feast! We add biscuits from Red Lobster to our meal every year because we're obsessed.

My backyard on Thanksgiving - it was beautiful!

Unfortunately all good things must come to an end, so I said goodbye to my parents, cats, and dogs (which was particularly difficult) and headed off to campus once again.

My sunset drive back to school.

Although it was sad to leave, I'm glad I'm back on campus again. I missed my townhouse bed oddly enough, and I was glad to have a bit of space after being around my family for a week straight for long periods of time (they're great people of course, but you know how everyone starts to annoy you after being around them for a while).

I'm currently back at work writing up my research proposal for my Media Studies senior seminar, and I'm happy to say it's almost done! It's hard to believe two finals and a paper are all that stands between me and a whole month off. I have plans to visit a friend in Florida in January, so I can't wait to live in the sun for a bit and avoid this intense Vermont cold!

I hope you all had a great break and an awesome Thanksgiving if you celebrate it. I'm sure these next three weeks will be exciting and hectic all at once, so I'll keep you posted!

Senior Seminar Madness.

I can't even believe it's Thanksgiving break next week. Where did the time go? As I'm closing in on the end of the fall semester of my senior year, I'm reflecting a lot on what I want to do once I graduate (STOP, STOP IT RIGHT NOW). I plan on getting my resume worked on through career services here on campus next semester and looking into graphic design, advertising, or digital media jobs around the Vermont, New York City, and Boston areas. I'm excited to begin my future career, but as you can imagine I'm also feeling nervous that the time is coming so close and that I'll be leaving Saint Mike's the May. Oh man.

Let's drop that thought for a second. On a related note, I've been working on my proposal for my MJD senior seminar for my book I plan to publish next semester for my senior project with my partner Tara Keady. We are exploring the perceptions of gender and sexuality on a global scale. As you can imagine, it's been very work-intensive with such a broad topic as we try to narrow it down to what we want to cover within it. We've been going to LGBTQ events, interviewing members of the LGBTQ community as well as those who study it and put on events for the LGBTQ community. It's been such a rewarding experience so far, and I can't wait to see what next semester brings as we put it all together slowly but surely.

This is Johnny Chag, who works at the Vermont Pride Center in Burlington

This is Jesse Thomas, who has transitioned from a female to a male. His story is incredible.

This is a drag queen from the First Friday event we went to at Higher Ground for the LGBTQ community. They happen the first friday of every month!

I'm so thrilled that this research and the final product that comes with it will be a part of my life forever. Being a member of the LGBTQ community myself, I feel very attached to this topic, and it's been truly amazing to learn more about it and find myself connecting with it in ways I never thought imaginable. I think that's been the most rewarding part of college - finding the things that I'm most passionate about and learning about them as much as I can.

I hope you've all found your passion in life as well. If you haven't yet, don't worry - it comes when you least expect it.

That's it from me for now, I hope you all enjoy your break and eat your weight in turkey. Happy Wednesday!

Let's Talk Business.

Alright, so it's been a while since I've posted, but senior year is a much different animal than the rest of my college experience thus far and I'm learning to adjust to not have time to do anything as I go along. Yet, here I am, finally posting, thank god! It's been a long and stressful past two weeks, but all the work I've been putting in is finally starting to pay off, as I can now say I'm officially done with the project for my first senior seminar!

This semester, I'm taking both my MJD senior seminar and my Business Administration senior seminar at the same time (I know what you're going to say - I'm crazy. I know, but I didn't have another choice with the way my schedule worked out), but I just finished preparing my mock business plan for my Business Administrations senior seminar and handed it in yesterday. and now I'm breathing a bit easier!

Here's a screenshot of the cover page - it ended up being over 70 pages long!

So when you're a Business Administration major at Saint Mike's, once you learn about the vast and in-depth worlds of finance, advertising, marketing, management, and a bunch of other business-related topics, you enter your final class to tie it all together - Business Strategy. This class offers an in-depth examination into various different business case scenarios of actual businesses, analyzes strategies to improve upon these businesses' strategies, and to top it all off, you get to make your very own mock business plan based on an idea that's totally your own! This mock business plan has to have everything under the sun, from sample advertisements to more financial statements than you ever knew existed. It's a TON of work, there's no hiding that, but the final product is well worth the stress!

For my groups' business plan, we created a business that will refurbish and sell donated skateboards, bicycles, scooters, and 100% recycled clothing while also donating a portion of our profits to Vermont outdoor movements, organizations, and charities to promote being environmentally friendly and echo our business' values. As hard as it all was to put together on time and as accurately as possible, it was such a rewarding experience! Oh, and did I mention that a few groups from each semester this class is offered get picked to participate in a business competition in the spring for a chance to win $5,000?

Needless to say, with that motivation on top of the motivation to get a good grade, I put my all into this and I'm so proud of how it turned out! My group makes our presentation to the class on it next week and I'm really nervous I'm going to mess something up, but I'm hoping my professor will like it and it has enough potential to get into the competition!

For those of you who are interested in the business program here at Saint Mike's or are in it already, just know that this kind of class is fairly unique to Saint Mike's. Not only is it very rigorous and in-depth, but it also offers you the chance to create a final project that not a lot of other business graduates from other schools can claim that they've done. I'm definitely going to tout this business plan on my resume for future employers, so if you're looking for a business program that's both challenging and sets you apart from the average college student, I would definitely recommend looking into the one here at Saint Mike's!

Fall Adventures!

Hey y'all, happy Saturday!

Having Friday off this week has given me much more time to buckle down and get some work done, but it's also allowed more time to relax and have fun with friends! I'm often so busy this semester (being it's senior year and I'm in 2 senior seminars right now...yikes) that I hardly have as much time to hang out with friends or go out as I used to, but I've still managed to break from the stress every once in a while and have some fun. 

Fall is debatably my favorite season (it's a battle between fall and summer, I just can't decide), but this fall has been especially strange up here in Vermont because it's continued to stay pretty warm throughout October. The other night I was walking around campus in just a tank and shorts and it must've been close to 70 degrees! It was insane, but hey, I'm not complaining.

On a somewhat different yet also related note, here are some pictures of fun fall times I've had so far this semester:

I love drives home in the fall. Look at how beautiful my driveway becomes!

Minecraft paid a little visit to SMC the other day!

Fellow blogger Kathryn Miyahira becomes a soldier!

In short, what's been the most stressful time of my life has had really nice moments of hilarity and relaxation sprinkled in-between to keep me sane. As long as I have great people and even better (preferably warm) weather to live off of, I'll always be happy. That's the great thing about Saint Michael's - sure, you're stressed out sometimes, that's just college, but you're also surrounded by great people that want to see you happy.

Military Life - Senior Year Edition.

So, this past weekend was drill for both my roommate Jesse and I. For those of you who may not know what drill is, it's an essential part of being in the National Guard or Reserve in the military where you go to your assigned based one weekend per month and do the job you were hired to do. For me, that is Client Systems, which is a fancy way of saying IT Technician basically. Jesse is a Navy Hospital Corpsman, so he works down in medical in his shop helping patients who need shots, blood work, and the like.

This is the first semester both of us have gone to drill at the same time while being officially done with all training required to wear the uniform and do the job. Jesse was gone to boot camp and his training school all last semester and some of the summer, while I did my training the year before around the same time frame. We've noticed that even though he's Navy and I'm Air Force, our schedules for drills have matched up oddly enough!

Jesse and I being goofballs after drill this past Sunday - 'Merica!

One of the reasons Saint Michael's College is such a great school is because of all of the support they offer for military members. Katherine Orthman, the woman in charge of coordinating students with the Veterans' Affairs Office for the school, has done everything from submitting paperwork for my GI Bill to selecting my classes for me when I was away training, and I couldn't be more thankful. Aside from that, the Air National Guard and Army National Guard both offer the Buxton Scholarship each semester, which can pay for the cost of up to 16 credits! I've been fortunate enough to receive it for the past two semesters, and I'll find out soon if I got it for next semester as well.

If you have any questions about how Saint Mike's works with the military, feel free to ask me! Im also going to be attending a military ball next month, so stay tuned for a post about that!

Happy Tuesday!