Directed Research

Directed Research has been quite an experience so far. We started off with ten days of field work which went by so fast. Every day in the morning we went out into different towns in the area to interview agriculturalists and pastoralists with a 75 question questionnaire that we had helped create. We asked the locals questions about land tenure, how they use their land, conflicts with wildlife, cultural aspects, and privatization. It was actually really interesting to hear all of their different answers but also hear about the similarities. We spent from about 9am to about 1pm walking around to farms and bomas conducting interviews. One or two groups a day would go around to the areas and collect GPS points of farms and town boundaries. Everything was going great until on Thanksgiving (we celebrated on the 28th) I had moved my computer to help decorate the dining hall and didn't realize until the end of the night that water had dripped from somewhere and gotten on the bottom of my laptop. That has made things really difficult because after a few unsuccessful attempts at drying it and turning it on Sam told me to put it in rice. It is still on rice after two days because I tried to turn it on after one day and it just started blinking and didn't turn on. My only concern is that I hadn't backed it up in about two weeks and it had about 80 data entries from our questionnaires on it and some of my most recent pictures on it. My group was super helpful and all pulled together to re-enter data (since I was the main data person before). There couldn't possibly be a worse time for this to happen because I will need to continue borrowing computers to read articles and write my paper while everyone else needs to use their computers to do the same. Fixing our data formatting and data analysis started yesterday. Communication is difficult between us and our professor sometimes so after we thought we were done he made us change a lot of things. Due dates are coming up fast and our final papers are due on the 7th, which is super stressful and scary. I know it will all be worth it in the end when I have my senior capstone paper and presentation pretty much done before next semester! Gotta keep a positive attitude and enjoy my last two weeks here. It is going by so fast!