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.

Winding Down

Over the last few weeks, I have been working on redesigning the map for Warner Park and it has been going really well! The ideas I have come up with seem to flow well with the concepts we are trying to incorporate on the map. I took into consideration all the suggestions and criticisms made at the last meeting and tried to create something that was more visual and more appealing. I was able to network with some people at Clean Lakes Alliance and found myself working with Ashlyn Mehlhaff who is the development director for CLA. At her last job she helped design a few maps and had some really great infographic ideas for me!

In my time with the Ice Age Trail Alliance I have contributed to hundreds of children’s experiences in the Wisconsin outdoors. I have helped to set a fire in these children which I can see burning strong. They are passionate and excited about the outdoors. However, just like a prairie fire, passion and excitement can burn out in a flash. They both must be rekindled periodically over the years. While experiences along the trail will undoubtedly influence these children in the future, I wanted to create a more permanent contribution to environmental education along the Trail.

Since my last post, I have been staying busy as the end of my internship with WWF inches closer and closer and I begin finalizing my project deliverables. Between all the reading, research, and scripting for the MOOC, I was able to enjoy a lovely Swedish Midsummer celebration with new friends, participated in an exciting global forum with policymakers at the Resilient Cities 2019 Conference in Bonn, Germany, and have begun to see my scripts come to life in initial filming for the MOOC. It’s been a pretty laid-back month, to say the least.

I wanted to wait until my last day as a Conservation International (CI) Global Strategy Intern (wow, that went quick!) to make my last post because we also launched my main deliverable, the strategic planning resource hub, on Friday. Many coworkers expressed how huge of an accomplishment and useful this would be for the organization, so the launch was pretty exciting for my supervisors and I!

About two-thirds of the way through my stay at Koh Yao Yai (KYY) has seen me comfortably settled in island life, interacting and learning about current affairs and attitudes of the community. I was specifically observing what people would do with their waste – finding myself highly aware of my own waste generation – since that is the focus of my project. With just over 2500 people to figure out in the sub-district I’m staying in (also called Koh Yao Yai), I found myself wondering what I could do and how I could help make a difference in short time I’m here for.