I was fortunate enough to join the African Impact in South Africa for a short time. During this time, I participated in field work including data collection of Africa's Big 5, including ethograms, location tracking, and more. In addition, our team spent time building relationships within the community, including children, teens, and adults, through gardening and reading classes. Prior to meeting with the community, we planned out lessons and activities for members to engage with.

Since 2015, I have been involved with several different zoos throughout Michigan. At each of these zoos, I have created and facilitated unique and engaging educational programs for guests of all different ages and demographics. Most of my outreach work in zoos involves hands-on lesson plans for learners to get an up close and personal look at wildlife and conservation. This includes live animal demos, public speaking to a crowd via microphone, live TV interviews, educational games, and more.

Outreach teaching means that I never know who my students will be on any given day, and they often come with many differnent knowledge levels regarding biology and conservation. I created this flyer to hand out at an already established zoo program, so that audience members could follow along regardless of their previous background of the subject. This breaks down the Four B's of Biology in a way that anyone can understand, which further enhances the existing zoo program.

Using Piktochart, I designed this infographic as a means to educate potential beach-goers about the organization Ocearch. The goal was to make an aesthetically pleasing, easy to read, informative piece illustrating the conservation work done by the organization. This piece demonstrates my design skills and ability to condense scientific information and concepts into an accessible, easy to digest manner.

One of my biggest goals is to make conservation accessible to everyone. I created this take-home ethogram keeping in mind that not everyone has wildlife in their backyard (or even a backyard at all) or access to the internet. This behavioral study is based around birds, so that children living in any area, urban, rural, or anywhere in between, can participate in wildlife biology and conservation right from home.

In order to display the fragility of food chains, I created this short video using iMovie. I wanted to explore my animation skills and prove that you can make an effective, engaging video without an exceptionally expensive or extravagant program. This video is targeted towards elementary-aged students, and describes biology-related issues in ways that are not too complicated or too graphic for a younger audience.

I strive to continue to refine my skills not just as an educator, but as a supervisor as well. My job of course is to educate the public about wildlife, but also to train seasonal education staff how to effectively do the same. After seeing some issues arise in our training program, I chose to make some amendments. My goal was to not only make it more fun and engaging, but to address some recurring behavioral issues along the way.

During graduate school, I found myself much more aware of my own privileges and subconscious biases. Coming from a very affluent school system, there were educational issues I was unaware of--one of these issues being school of choice. I wrote this letter to showcase my professional writing skills and to address the inequities that school of choice creates while acknowledging that it promotes segregation.