Welcome to Akron!!! (Sunday and Monday)

I've been at University of Akron for over a week now. For those that don't know, I accepted a research internship here for the summer and I will be here until August 1. With that being said, I thought I would use this blog to catalog my experience here; this is mostly for myself but I suppose my family and maybe some of my friends would be interested in it too. That was a bit tangential, back to what I was saying. I've been here since last Sunday. This is going to be an EXTENSIVE update.

Last Sunday I finished moving out of my apartment at JMU and hit the road, Akron or bust, at 6am. The drive was pretty uneventful to say the least but it wore me out so when I got to Akron I was relieved that I could just take a break and relax for a bit.... so I thought. I arrived at U of Akron at 1pm, an hour later than I had expected to (thank you Pennsylvania, for the endless construction on your turnpike!). When I got checked in, I was able to drop off some of my stuff in my room before the REU group started pining for lunch (myself included). We went to Subway (all but one of us) and got a chance to meet and bond. Our group consists of 6 people, 2 men and 4 women: Me, Bayoan, Tara, Alysha, Mollika, & Alexandria. Overall I think that we're a great group; we clicked pretty immediately and have gotten along well ever since. That night we had a cookout out the field station and got to continue getting to know each other as well as meet some of the mentors for the program; my mentor is Dr. Greg Smith, by my choice and his. I think by the end of that night the REU group, the students, really clicked and were comfortable with each other which was awesome. Returned to the dorm (apartment style, ftw) for some shut eye that evening; I don't know what it is but the first night sleeping in a new place is always so eerie for me, but I got through it.

Bright and early on Monday:

Debbie (our grad student/grad assistant person) brought us bagels from Einstein Bros. (nice!) and we trekked off to campus to get our student IDs (Zip cards), parking passes, lunch, etc; it was a pretty uneventful outing aside from Tara losing her driver's license (you'll soon see that this is going to be a common trend...). In the late afternoon, however, we went out to the field station/Bath Nature Preserve for another cookout (free food is always a good time) and an "orienteering event" (If you don't know what orienteering is don't feel bad, neither did I. Here you go.) Anyway, it turned into a more informal nature hike and we were really more concerned, as a group, with finding cool critters than finding the orienteering flag, marker things. We ended up finding a spotted salamander, painted turtle (that peed all over the place and on Alysha), a frog, and a garter snake (I caught this one) and also saw a couple different kinds of birds.

This is a good shot of the group, taken by Mollika so she's not pictured. I'm wearing the cowboy hat.

Here I am looking for the snake that I eventually caught (thanks to Tara spotting it)

Overall, it was a great time and these group outings have really done a lot to bring us together as a group and help us bond, which has been great because we've had a ton of fun.


Thats all for Sunday and Monday, I would go into more detail but this post is already sort of unmanageable. Keep an eye out for Tuesday-this past weekend.