Welcome to December

Coincidentally, my birthday and the last day of the semester are the same day this year - Friday, December 21st. It'll definitely be one happy day for me!

I have 3 weeks left of school. I'm about to go nuts. I have 6 presentations to do in 2 weeks. They each need their own powerpoint too. It's not easy making powerpoints! They take time to figure out how much you really need on a slide and finding appropriate pictures to go with them and making sure you're within your time limit.

My presentation schedule:
Monday, Dec 3 - Water Law - Exercise 5, Safe Drinking Water Act
Tuesday, Dec 4 - Marine bio - Ocean Sunfish Biology
Wednesday, Dec 5 - Capstone - Proposal presentation (my advisor is going to be there and other professors!)
Monday, Dec 10 - Water Law - Final paper presentation, San Francisco Delta and Ecological Impacts
Tuesday, Dec 11 - Food Ethics - Final paper presentation, Ecotourism
Tuesday, Dec 11 - Marine bio - Ocean Sunfish Ecology

My papers are due between two weeks and they're papers that require a lot of work. Here's when those are due.
Thursday, Dec 13 - Marine bio - 5 pgs single-spaced (min) on the Ocean Sunfish (ecology and biology)
Wednesday, Dec 19 - Water law - 10 pgs single-spaced (min) on San Fran Delta and the ecological impacts
Wednesday, Dec 19 - Capstone proposal - However long on the economic impacts of domoic acid and saxitoxin occurrences have on commercial shellfish industries and tourism in California
Thursday, Dec 20 - Food Ethics - However long on ecotourism

I also have 2 finals. We're having a marine biology lab final (Tues, Dec 11 - based off the concepts/methods we used during labs this past semester) and we have a marine biology final (Tues, Dec 18 - last 3rd of the semester, mostly).

I'm still working at Borders on Sat and I have the aquarium once between now and then (Sunday, Dec 9th). Not to mention MBARI on Monday (3-6pm) and Friday (10-6pm). I do feel like I'm going to go nuts, but I also have so much to do that I just don't always know where to begin! I've been working more on presentations than my papers, which should be the other way, but that's how it's been working so far. I - for the most part - don't have any schoolwork due in between everything else, but I do have 2 more assignments for Food Ethics on top of our final paper and presentation. Not sure about Marine bio if he'll give us another lit review or not. I hope not!

The end of the tunnel is definitely within sight. I'll have one semester left and then I'll be finished with college!

This last Friday I attended a meeting in Sacramento put on by COMPASS (Communication Partnership for Science and the Sea). I attended because Judy told me about it so I basically went for MBARI/work/school. COMPASS does these Legislative Sacramento Luncheons for legislators (more so their staff) can learn about various ocean issues and why they have an importance to legislators and the public). It was in a building in front of the State Capital building and it has the Appeals Court and State Library in it. It was an amazing building. All marble and everything. The drinking fountains were even marble! LoL The elevator was super fast too. So fast (the meeting was on the top floor - 5th floor) my stomach dropped for about 3 floors. By the time I got over it, the elevator was slowing down for the 1st floor. Anyway, the meeting was on the same topic as my capstone, so that was good. It touched upon what I'm researching and I did learn some new things, but the most important thing I got out of it is NETWORKING! Two of the people I've been e-mailing were attending the meeting as speakers. I got a stiff e-mail from one of them before. When I introduced myself to this same gentleman, we started talking and he said if I need any help to just e-mail him anytime! YES! My first solid west coast contact.

Anyway, with that. I must go. I need to get back to homework (working on my capstone presentation) and go to bed.