Advising time

Next week marks the beginning of Summer/Fall registration, so the better-prepared of my advisees have been honoring my request for advising appointments. At these meetings, we discuss their academic futures and, more pressing, their upcoming semester schedules. These talks are also beneficial in that I get to have informal chats with my advisees (some of whom come chat regularly anyway) and therefore get to know them quite well. In fact, last semester my Biology colleagues and I invited all of our freshmen advisees out for pizza, as we were each granted money from the College of Arts and Sciences to have a social gathering with these students. It was great to have so many new students together with the faculty in such a laid back setting. We really got to know eachother!

Service Learning and Extraordinary Students

I had intended to direct your attention to the intriguing science news of the week (potential new HIV treatment, long-life genes discovered, breakfast resulting in less weight gain, etc.), but instead I wanted to direct you toward the other links at the bottom of this page. These are links to my students' blogs that describe their Service Learning projects. They are doing a phenomenal job, and have recently posted interviews they conducted with people they consider to be experts on the topic addressed by each of their projects. They will next post answers to questions about some challenging scientific papers they've been assigned to read based on their interviews.
I also wanted to express my pride in an exceptional research student of mine, Rebecca (pictured above after a hot day of snake tracking), who recently submitted an application for a Dean's Undergraduate Fellowship for Research. If she receives this fellowship, she and I (and others) will continue our snake tracking in the summer and expand the project to include DNA analysis. She will then present these data in a poster at the ASIH (American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists) in Montreal this summer.
Our students are just outstanding!