Conservation Impacts on the Global Scale

This is a follow-up post to the Vietnam Retrospective. Our travel group visited Vietnam and Cambodia in one long trip. The 4th day after our experiences in Vietnam, we left to explore its neighboring country, Cambodia. We met our tour guides, Tana and Untac, both of whom, I would find, are great conversationalists and very knowledgeable concerning Cambodian history. As I would learn more about, Cambodia has a bloody recent history like Vietnam. Our tour covered two sites from the Khmer Rouge, S-21/Tuol Sleng and the Choeung Ek Killing Fields, which were once places where some of the worst crimes known to humanity were committed.  However, on the other hand, our group also was able to learn and experience how Cambodia is growing stronger as a nation and changing in the wake of the Cambodian genocide. I was especially happy to see the persistence of traditional Cambodian art and culture through the efforts of Cambodian Living Arts, an organization that teaches young Cambodians ...

Now that I'm back home, I wanted to take some time to reflect on my experiences over the Vietnam/Cambodia school trip that I participated in for the last two weeks.  Martin and I wrote two blog posts during the trip that you can see here:  https://polygipvietnamcambodia.blogspot.com/2019/ . However, I feel a lot of what I could have said was not on the blog posts because of the time constraints (We could only write for a small portion of the time) and now that I've had a chance to reflect on the trip, I have more insight to contribute concerning our adventures in Vietnam and Cambodia. I'd like to be as honest as possible with what I say, so apologies if I sound overly negative about an experience.  Without further delay, I'd like to first talk a bit about Vietnam and my experience there.  Upon first stepping outside the Ho Chi Minh City/Saigon airport, I was immediately greeted with intense heat and humidity, which would be the norm for virtually the entir...

I'm still working on what exactly I'd like to do for my project and how to execute it. I've been exploring some ideas, though, and the activities/opportunities I participate in during the summer will surely inform the final vision for my Capstone Project/grant proposal. When I started the Global Scholars program my vision for my project was going to be something along the lines of conservation or epidemiology. I think, however, my final project may lean more towards education than anything. I'm deeply interested in making science and math more accessible for others, and I think this is an objective that holds importance for students all over the world. However, I'll still give a brief update on my progress in the fields that are possible projects for Global Scholars. Epidemiology: I'm still looking around for good connections relating to epidemiology (though I've gotten two from Sean Liu, a fellow Global Scholar), but I'll be taking part in a biology...

Kalyanee Mam's presentation put into perspective something that many may take for granted. She began her presentation with a question of "What is home to you?" The general trend among respondents was a series of responses pertaining to family or interpersonal relationships. However, Mam's film that she screened, Lost World, covered something radically different yet equally significant: the land beneath our feet. The film covered the story of a Cambodian woman, Phalla Vy, and her perspective as she observes dredging, piles of sand being used for the expansion of Singapore, and Gardens by the Bay, an artificial garden theme park. What struck me about the film was how Mam displayed the flippancy of the dredging industry as a whole. They failed to recognize the importance of sand to the locals in Cambodia, as without sand, the local crab population goes down, and the livelihood of fisherwomen like Vy is endangered. The government stopped protests by the locals who w...

Ms. Atar's presentation on her program, Miry's List was a very enlightening presentation on the struggles that refugees have to go through in order to settle in the United States. While I wasn't able to attend the entirety of her speech, the parts I were able to hear gave a lot of insight into many issues that refugees are faced with that we may not consider, including the trauma that many families face upon forced immigration to the United States. Not only are families faced with the pain of not being able to stay with loved ones back in their home countries, knowing that they could be in danger due to armed conflicts or political instability, they also have the difficult task of adapting to a completely different society in the United States with its unspoken rules, standards, and of course, different languages. Many families have to endure harsh conditions when living in the United States; Miry described one family in particular having to live in a small apartment with ...

Something that I'm interested in looking at as a Global Scholar will be epidemiology. Along that vein, climate change is going to make disease-related issues worse. The higher temperatures will be better for mosquitoes to spread infections, which will really put pressure on us as a society. How will we remedy this? Guess what: there's a neat little thing called CRISPR that we have now that we can use to hopefully deal with this problem. I'm also going to use this opportunity to clear up with CRISPR is and why it's a pretty cool discovery. Everyone knows that humans have immune systems: that's why we can fend off those pesky colds and flus. However, lesser known is the fact that other organisms have equivalent defense systems, namely plants (very interesting, but not too relevant yet) and interestingly enough, microorganisms such as bacteria. CRISPR stands for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats. Quite a mouthful. What's important here is th...

I greatly enjoyed Reyna Grande's presentation on her growth as a writer. I wasn't particularly informed on her work before I attended the event, but with the little prior knowledge I entered the event with, I could definitely appreciate the nature of her work. Grande is a Mexican writer who has proverbially "gained her wings" as a writer and writes primarily to reveal the complexities surrounding immigration. The importance of her work cannot be stated enough in this day and age. Speaking from the Mexican perspective to help shed some light on the complexities of immigration at a young age should do wonders to better the understanding of immigration of those that read her work. I myself can speak to the complexities of immigration: my parents were immigrants to the United States who struggled in its radically different environment. I think of my mother when I hear the story of Reyna Grande: she succeeded in an engineer in a male-dominated industry like Reyna, who foun...