Michelle Pinkrah
The past three semesters as a College Park Scholar have been nothing like I thought they would be. I had heard of the program prior to joining but had never actually planned to join until I found out I had been accepted and everything kind of changed. This experience was further altered by the fact that I really experienced most of my College Park Scholars journey in quarantine in the middle of a raging pandemic. But regardless, the global change program was an essential program to me deepening my knowledge of science practices and our current climate struggles. I always knew the climate issues we face and are continuing to face were bad, as I had done a prior project on how rain acidification and soil salinity increase were affecting the growth of mushrooms, but this program really opened my eyes to just how much our ecological systems have been changed and damaged by human practices. That plus the relation to how the layman and political understanding of climate change is wholly inadequate at actually addressing these problems helped to give convey a well-rounded explanation of the global changes of our past present and future.
The Science and Global program change was also extremely useful in offering me knowledge that was useful in other classes I took. I took GEOG 330 during my freshmen year and many of the discussions on sustainability and society development that we touched upon during that class were discussed and touched upon in the program. The lecture on logical fallacies and bad-faith arguments was helpful in my social psychology class I took during this semester. So much of what I learned applied to other classes and other interests I had, that it made this program invaluable to me.
Doing this program during quarantine and as a commuter student, it was easy to isolate and not really get the full force of the living-learning program, but the professors and the program as a whole adjusted to encourage more interaction even when social distancing, it was definitely a needed sense of normality during it all.