Hello again everyone, WOW, was this a busy week of the internship, but such a fun one all the way around! I was finally able to meet the rest of the interns, and learned so many incredible things at the University of Maryland... but more on that later. First, I'll go through what the week looked like for me on the Eastern Shore!
Monday, I was at the Talbot County Extension Office. Entries for the fair had closed on the previous Friday, so now we had a baseline of how many competitors to expect at the fair. My main task for the day revolved around an excel spreadsheet (that excel college course I took last Fall paid off for sure)! At the Talbot County Fair, each exhibitor is given a fair t-shirt, indoor exhibits and animal exhibits receiving different shirts. My task was centered around the animal exhibitors. The easy part was figuring out how many shirts we would need of each size, using the countif function to quickly calculate how many smalls, mediums, etc. we would need. The more tedious part was figuring out when each child would receive their shirts... While some exhibitors only showed one species, many kids show multiple species on different days. I organized everything into the show order, and planned on kids receiving their shirts at their first competition of the fair, but still included them as a possibility for shows later in the schedule, just in case they scratched from their original competition.
In Queen Anne's County, I took a small morning field trip to the Queen Anne's County High School to watch the ag departments Junior Capstone Presentations. Teacher Brian Stokes made it a very welcoming experience, letting me view not only the Juniors Projects, but also some of the display boards made by the seniors that recently graduated! The four junior presenters did a great job with their topics, a couple of which included how topography affects crop growth, and how different coatings for steel compare in withstanding weathering, abrasions, etc..
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| Had to get a picture with the Juniors following their presentations, thank you Mr. Stokes for taking this picture, great job to all these incredible Juniors! |
Skipping forward to Friday, I was at the Kent County Extension Office, preparing scoresheet for indoor exhibits. No, our entries for indoor exhibits are not closed yet (and they won't be until July 1st), but there are a few categories where we knew we needed more scoresheets. So after finishing the easy categories like decoupage and well-dressed table, I moved on to the one that would test my patience, photography... As a photography lover, who competed in the category for years, I know how many entries the division gets, and each scoresheet had three pages. After what felt like hours of copying, organizing, and stapling, I finished making roughly 200 new scoresheets for the photography division.
Now of course, the highlight of the week was the Campus Residency & Research Tour at the University of Maryland in College Park. I finally got to meet the other 8 interns, and spent plenty of time getting to know the group throughout our two days together. We even spent some time together after finishing the first days activities, heading out to "Boards & Brews" to play a board game called "Sounds Fishy" together. It was an incredibly fun evening, unfortunately GPS didn't want to cooperate for some of the other interns, but we missed having them with us! I must say though, winning a game the centered around being a good liar may have had me questioning a thing or two about myself, haha!
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| A fun night out with some of the other interns, playing board games and learning more about each other! |
We had two leadership training sessions, the first days session run by Antonio Silas, and the second days being run by Myles Alexander. An activity that really stood out to me was a game Myles had us play called "Barnga", which seemed to be a standard card game, but we were not allowed to use verbal or written communication. At first, this seemed easy, as the group I was in understood our rules and got by without any trouble. as the game went on though, confusion was apparent as people were told to switch groups, as each group was given a different set of rules to go off of. The game showed how important it is to have good communication with others in order to clear up any misunderstandings and ensure everyone in the group is on the same page.
Two of my favorite stops we had during the campus tour was the Fermentation Science Lab and the Aquaponics Greenhouse and Lab. I was able to speak with Tom Flores at the luncheon on Thursday, and hope to connect him with Oksana Bocharova, owner of Oksana's Produce Farm in Chestertown, MD. Hopefully Tom will be able to work with her on some workshop centered around pickling, as that is her specialty!
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