It’s amazing what a week can do! I went to Iceland for spring break and didn’t think about school at all for 5 days (oops, don’t tell Liz!) and it was exactly what I needed. I got some distance from my thesis, and am now able to look at it with fresh eyes. It was incredibly helpful to get feedback from Liz, who has the bigger picture in mind, as well as what a scholarly essay is actually supposed to look like. Her feedback was not surprising — expand the top and bottom of my hourglass more. I can definitely see that I need to integrate the top of my hourglass more, as it is a bit segmented. The bottom of my hourglass feels like a bit of a mess right now. AnaCapri helped me by identifying “discussion-y” material in my results section, so I will be able to move that around easily. Liz identified a few more issues to address in my discussion, such as the role of animals in disaster preparedness/relief. I wasn’t sure if that was relevant to discuss initially, since although it stood out to me in my qualitative analysis, it didn’t actually make up a huge part of the percentages I came up with in the end. Yesterday I helped lead an open house about Cascadia, and one neighbor specifically asked what to do about pets during the shaking. I thought that was really interesting (I didn’t really know what to tell her — leave the cats, they will land on their feet? Save yourselves?) and it reaffirmed my observation that animals play a big part in the neighbors’ lives.
It was also much easier to revise my poster after getting some space from it. It was more obvious what was important to include this time around. I’m using Canva again (obviously) but it’s uncharted territory in some ways — I’m not sure what size text I should use, and how it will turn out when printed since LC ENVS usually uses Google Drawing/Slides or PowerPoint. I have a suspicion that the text will be very large compared to Google created posters, but am not sure if that is a bad thing or not, since people usually include too much text anyway. I ended up including information from all three of my infographics as well, which makes sense they are derived from my thesis, but it was also reaffirming to see how easily they fit into presenting my thesis information.
My next step will be delving back into my thesis! There are only a few weeks left of the semester, so every week will be a crunch week in terms of workload, but I definitely feel prepared and rejuvenated after spring break.