Day 1

WELCOME TO THE SEWANEE ENVIRONMENTAL INSTITUTE – PRE-COLLEGE FIELD STUDIES EXPERIENCE 2009! (SEI 2009)

Today is the first day of a brand new pilot program for high school Juniors and Seniors. Each day, we (the first class of students EVER through this program) have to update this blog thing. And it’s my turn. So:

For the first day, we all met and went to an Opening talk held by the Dean of Undergraduates Eric Hartman and Dr. Jon Evans, Director of SEI. It was a cool overview of everything we’re going to be doing. The two weeks of field studies culminating in Group Projects on the King Farm where we’ll have to apply all the skills we’ve learned to figure out why the King Farm succeeded onto of the plateau while the others failed. It should be very interesting and educational.

After the Opening, we had a campus tour led by our awesome ‘camp counselors’, Bentley and Allison. Sewanee is really pretty (but most of you parents have been here so I don’t need to tell you that…) We’re staying in Hoffman dorm because it has air conditioning. It’s comfortable. Everyone seems to have settled pretty well. We eat at McClurg’s which is the big dining hall in the middle of campus. They have almost everything. According to Bentley and Allison, whatever they don’t have now, they have during the school year.

After the tour and dinner, Dr. Evans introduced us to SEI through a presentation called Sewanee Landscape Overview. He covered what we were supposed to expect, field safety guidelines, vocabulary, and the basic geology of the Domain. Following Dr. Evans’ introduction to the plateau, Allison and Rachel performed a comical skit designed to teach field safety.

And that was Day 1.

-Hannah