Thursday, June 23, 2005

Equipment requests

I'm going to be teaching an advanced field research course for a few weeks this summer. The goal of the course is to introduce the students to collecting and identifying all the fungi, plants, and animals we find at a field site in Canada; we'll be spending a full week up there come August. The course should be a blast, largely because all of the students currently registered are former students of mine, and they're all very excited about the trip; many of them have even been meeting for the last few months (without getting any credit) planning for the trip.

The only problem is that our field site has absolutely no field equipment, and my official budget for the course at the present time is functionally $0. While I can bring up some equipment from our main campus, my campus hasn't run a field biology course like this in so long that we don't have a lot of required equipment (insect collecting supplies, flagging, plant presses, etc.) So, for the past few weeks I've been working on creating an equipment list (with the help of some of my students), and this afternoon I presented the list to the head of our college foundation, with the hopes that they'll fund at least some of the equipment.

The foundation director said I should hear from them within a few days; here's hoping!

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