AJCU Honors Conference

This weekend, three honors students (pictured with their requisite cheesesteaks and a Rockhurst alum with whom we had dinner) and Dr. Mary Haskins and I went to Philadelphia for the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities Honors conference.  We came away with lots of great ideas to incorporate into our program, and we got to go to the Mutter Museum on our last day.  As four out of five of us were biologists/science majors, we were very interested in seeing the specimens at this museum of medical history and anatomical anomalies.  It was really fascinating and is a don't-miss destination in Philadelphia.

Evolution blogs!

Please scroll down to the bottom of the page to see the service-learning blogs put together by my creative Evolution students!  And remember to check back with them periodically throughout the semester to check their progress! (picture from www.evolution.berkeley.edu)

Expanding Your Horizons

Friday night, my ball python, Monty, and I packed up and went to Science City to introduce 50 middle-school girls to herpetology (the study of reptiles and amphibians).  We were one of several sessions in a great program called "Expanding Your Horizons" that introduces young girls to Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) fields.  The girls all fell in love with Monty, including those who "hated" snakes initially, and enjoyed learning about him and the other herps at the Nature Center in Science City.  They also had a chance to pick up stuffed or rubber snakes with snake tongs to practice their skills.  Some of the girls are pictured here (with permission).

Service Trip Meeting

In March I will have the singular honor of serving as a Companion on our Rockhurst service immersion trip to Belize.  This will be my fourth service trip with the university, and my third to Belize.  I look very forward to seeing the people of Belize again, and to exposing 12 of our best students to this amazing country.  Yesterday, we had our all-group service trip meeting, at which the Counseling Center talked us through the results of our Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test (experientially, as you can see from the picture, where we are all lining up in accordance with our MBTI results).  If you have ever found Waldo, you should be able to pick me out in this picture...

Presentation on the Evolution of Flight

Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending a talk by Dr. David Burnham entitled "A Three-Point Landing for the Origin of Flight: Four-Winged Wonders."  The presentation was based on recent fossil evidence from China indicating that the first "birds" (the definition is under some debate in the paleontological world) had pelvic wings in addition to the typical pectoral wings (see picture). They are thought to have been tree-dwellers who fed on other birds.  Pretty cool.  It was a fascinating talk and I plan to go to his next presentation on February 10th.  It will be at 1:00pm in Haag Hall on the UMKC campus if you're interested in attending!

NCHC Boston

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to take 5 (yes, 5!) members of our Honors Student Association Executive Board to Boston with me for the annual National Collegiate Honors Council conference.  There were close to 2000 attendees, and 15 concurrent sessions every 45 minutes all day for three days.  We decided to divide and conquer, so we split up and tried to attend as many talks of interest as we could.  We were able to bring back tons of great ideas, some of which we hope to implement here in the Rockhurst Honors Program.  We also gave two talks (I served on a panel that discussed Honors Programs at Jesuit institutions, and two of our students (pictured) presented about their trip to Haiti and how it could be transformed into the experiential portion of an interdisciplinary honors course).  We also had to visit a few Boston landmarks like Fenway Park.

Kansas Herp Society meeting

This weekend I attended the Kansas Herpetological Society annual conference in Hays, Kansas.  The social events were held at the Sternberg Museum, an absolute gem of a natural history museum in the middle of Kansas.  On Friday evening, the Joseph T. Collins Library was dedicated and officially opened to us, along with the museum itself and the new Rattlers exhibit.  The latter housed live specimens of 19 of the 22 species of rattlesnakes in the US. It was amazing, thanks to the hard work of curators Curtis Schmidt and Travis Taggert.  The talks were held at Ft. Hays State University, and there were several that were very interesting and well-presented.  Overall it was a great weekend, but the absence of our hero and mentor, Joe Collins, was certainly conspicuous.  We all really, really missed him.