Well it’s the home-stretch now and man can I feel it! The cycle of evening meetings and additional weekend hours in the office has slowly, but surely been grinding me down. I fell ill this past weekend and realized, once I missed a full day of work, how little spare time I have to shuffle around. Still, I learned long ago that I work happiest with my time at a premium. As the weeks and days left wind away, I also feel more confident that this work has and can continue to provide the purpose I had been seeking since I decided to pursue a career in environmental science. It’s rewarding to dive in each day as I add to and pare down my deliverables. Even though that’s only as glamorous as multitudes of word documents and tables, the related meetings out in the communities provide a tangible reminder of my motivation and the benefits of this work.

Following the Map:

The work I’ve done for my placement so far is very similar to the expectations outlined in my proposal and preparatory discussions with my current supervisor. Namely, I’ve been handling community outreach, mitigation planning, review of the Flooding Resilience Scorecard and ingesting an almost obscene amount of terminology and associated acronyms. One key difference is target audience. While most of my proposal and initial work focused on the Village of Viola, now that they’re “off the ground” they have also slowed down their process and are in what appears to be a holding pattern until Hazard Mitigation Grant awards are in circulation. However, another community, the Village of La Valle is just getting started. So, much of the work description that follows comes from engagement with their newly formed Revitalization Committee, which has been a pleasure to sit in on.