FW 441

In order to graduate all Fisheries and Wildlife students have to finish the Group Problem Solving series. This is a year long class teaching us how to work in groups (obviously). The group I've signed in to is a group trying in increase diversity in the Fisheries and Wildlife field. Our first few meetings were really rough, nobody seemed interested, people kept talking in circles and nobody seemed to want to speak up and move forward. I discussed my problems with the instructor, which opened up a whole new can of worms. It turns out nobody but me had thanked her for the pizza or snacks that she had provided and she was hurt, which I understand. Last week we had a guest speaker, Dr. John Bliss. He is a professor in the College of Forestry at OSU. His bachelor's degree was in Anthropology. So, Dr. Bliss came to talk to us about social sciences in natural resources. His only request was that people read a chapter that he wrote before the talk. Several people didn't read it, those who did thought the paper was a review about statistics. I, on the other hand, found the paper really helpful and was incredibly frustrated by the lack on interest by my group mates. Tonight people talked more, which made me happy. They still seem less interested in this project than I am and are uninterested in doing any extrawork but at least we're moving forward. Our next step is to create a set of specific questions and a questionnaire about ethnicity, age, socio-economic status and gender. Then we'll get out and do some prliminary research figure out what we need to do to get minorities interested and start creating information to send out with professionals. I'm excited, this has actually led to my decision to apply to Portland State University. I'd like to study more about citizen science and outreach education for minorities and urban residents. After four weeks the only thing I know for certain is that we have a lot of work ahead of us!