Earlier this semester, I found a news article discussing indigenous participation in climate change policy. My understanding of this article was enhanced by having a strong contextual background for the interaction of minority groups with climate change, something that I was given through the colloquium activities. I came into the article with the understanding that climate change has the strongest impacts on those who contribute the least to it, and that it disproportionately affects minority groups, indigenous populations included. Despite this, it is still very difficult for indigenous communities to involve themselves in the discussion and execution of climate change policy. Without SGC, I may not have understood the full context. In the end, I ended up choosing this subject as the topic for my practicum project, something that wouldn’t have happened without specifically what was taught in colloquium.
I employed the hypothetico-deductive method of science to determine whether the person I rejected the advances of was stalking me or not. To start, I formed the hypothesis that my alternate account for the social media app Discord that is logged into my computer was being monitored for whether I was online or not, as the app opens on a computer automatically and turns off when my computer shuts down for the night. I formed this hypothesis by considering all of the possible ways that I could have been watched, and that was the simplest explanation for how this person knew whether or not I was awake. To test my hypothesis, I purposely set my computer to appear as offline on social media after a long string of unread messages from this person, and recorded the time at which I did so. After receiving a message acknowledging the fact that I had gone to sleep only 4 minutes after shutting down my computer for the night, I had the necessary information to safely deduct the fact that my online status was being constantly monitored by this individual. My SGC experience helped teach me to consider all possibilities, and to make sure I had evidence to support my claims. The simplest explanation being the best one was a technique that SGC also taught me.
During my class I am taking for my practicum project, CPSS220, there were many opportunities to share ideas and get feedback from other students, some of which were also in SGC. This helped me a lot in completing and refining my project. One student even gave me the idea for the execution of my project in the first place, by suggesting I consider the point of view of the group trying to get involved instead of the group who is already involved. Also, the in class activities where other students explained what they had researched was also helpful in understanding more climate change combatting methods than I could have gone through on my own. I often found those discussions to be very informative.
In order to contribute to the Scholars environment, I actively participated in completing all of the colloquium projects and participated in many of the group discussions during class, assisting my groups in learning content and completing assignments. I worked hard on Service Day, something I’m definitely not used to doing. While I may not have been a strong participant in the greater scholars community, I did always participate and engage with all of my academic responsibilities.
I was challenged by the dilemma of how much the food production industry impacts climate change. I eat meat, especially beef, quite often, and learning about how damaging this industry was to the environment caused me to reflect on my own enjoyment of these foods and see how much they were hurting the planet. Colloquium taught me about how agriculture is one of the top emitters of carbon into the atmosphere, something that I never knew to be true before. I knew that the fossil fuel industry was the most important factor driving climate change, and I was certainly vaguely aware that eating plants was better for the planet than eating meat, but I didn’t know just how much of our infrastructure, especially the food production industry, is designed in such a way so as to drive up global warming. While my belief that meat tastes good hasn’t changed, I’ve started to mentally prepare myself for a future world where it just isn’t as common as part of a regular diet, as well as take more steps to branch out my tastes so that I’m not as affected by an international shift towards plant based diets.
I think that SGC has done a great job of making me aware of the climate crisis. I knew that climate change was an issue, but SGC really went in depth on the topic and taught me a lot about how bad it really was and why it was that way. I wouldn’t have had climate change on my radar as something I’m strongly caring about, but completing SGC has changed that. I am now more informed on climate change than I ever was, and understand specifically what about our society are the really big issues. In the future, I can be more aware of climate change as a fundamental issue in our society that needs to be addressed in all aspects of society. It’s also shown me the huge potential of the sustainability industry. People are going to need to start implementing climate solutions, and the job market there will only increase. While I can’t say that I’m definitely going to do that, it has given me something to think on when planning for a future that I’m uncertain about. I also think that going through the practicum project through CPSS220 in the middle of the semester is going to improve my ability to manage long-term projects in the future. Managing my time to work on the project was difficult with other classes, with my computer science classes in particular making things extremely difficult, but I believe that I improved at that skill by getting through it.