Intro week

Our journey for this new adventure began on Tuesday May 10th, with a move in and meeting of roommates. I was super excited to learn who my roommates were going to be for the week and about how this whole class was going to work out! On our second day we spent all morning in the UWF pool making sure that we were all able to swim and knew how to use our masks, snorkels, and fins. After spending the morning in the pool we were all tired and hungry, but we were also looking forward to our next activities! We spent the rest of the day in a lecture hall learning more about our class, the Florida watershed, and physical oceanography (these lectures are really courses in themselves that have been condensed into a little more than an hour, which when you think about it, is really incredible!). Day three began with team building exercises, I know what it sounds like but they were actually a blast! We began with the traditional trust games and group exercises, such as "car&driver" and "lower the poll"; in "car&driver" the car is blindfolded and the driver attempts to make sure that they don't hit anyone or anything, and in "lower the poll" the whole group has to hold a poll together using their index fingers, the goal of this is to lower the poll to the ground and keep your fingers on it. After these activities we were guided through the woods and on obstacle course, my personal favorite was a tight rope course where we had to figure out where to place a rope that we could use to help us get across. Once we got through the course, we were taken back to the classroom for some more afternoon lectures. Our last day was full of lectures, I know that it doesn't sound so interesting but it was very interesting! We spent the first half of the day learning about and discussing sharks and how to keep them happy. One thing that I found particularly interesting was that even if you release a shark, there is a good chance that the levels of stress hormones will be too high for the shark and it will not survive. The second half of the day we discussed biological statistics and how we may be able to study sea grasses in the Pensacola area.

Over all it was a fun and exhausting first week! I loved getting to know the group of people that I will be traveling with and look forward to the next five weeks! Pictures are on the way, we had too much fun to remember to take any!