There's dirt filling every pore, a kink in my neck from straining down into the unit, and several rocks somewhere in my abdomen desperate to make their presence known. Lifting the last spoonful of 5YR 3/2 silty clay loam carefully into the dustpan with my trusty plastic spoon, I confidently declare the shallow, twisting tunnel I had spent the last 45 minutes meticulously excavating... a chipmunk hole. Likely constructed in the early 21st century. Strange though it may sound, this experience is one of my proudest moments. Sweat dripping down my nose from the humid Connecticut summer, back sore from countless hours hunched over screens, finding nothing in the small dustpan’s worth of dirt collected from the potential feature, I knew there was nothing I would rather do. …show more content…
For nearly three years of my time at the University of Minnesota, Morris (UMM) I worked for the Center for Small Towns, an outreach office on campus intended to connect the resources of the university to rural communities in Minnesota. While there, I worked on a variety of projects focusing on compiling, analyzing, and then presenting data. These projects primarily took the form of designing and implementing surveys, but my favorite project consisted of learning to use RStudio to design a web application that displays historical population data in an interactive, user-friendly way. The app includes everything from population pyramids to median household incomes, and allows the user to superimpose graphs and compare communities across Minnesota. For me, this project realized a mission in the form of making data and knowledge accessible, to better equip populations (that may not have otherwise had access to this information) to educate themselves and