Yesterday there was a COPLAC conference held at our school, and Jess and I were asked to attend a part of it for the honors program on campus. There was an art exhibit as well as poster presentations, and we decided that might be a fun part of the conference to attend. It turns out that luck was on our side, because there were two different student research poster presentations that related to fracking in one way or another. One of the students we talked to said that as long as her adviser approves, she would be willing to allow us to post her research. The other student we talked to was incredibly interested in having us present his research, and he talked to use for a decent amount of time about how the specific poster he was presenting was only a part of the research that they have been conducting. His research actually focused on locating and properly fixing abandoned wells in Tioga County, as that is part of the issue here. Many wells were not properly plugged when they were done being used, and they also were not properly documented. He told us about different types of software that is being developed to help locate abandoned wells, how the software will help our community, and how it may also help other communities. It was incredibly interesting to listen to, as well as very helpful in the conflict resolution aspect of our project. Earlier this week, Jess and I had decided to push the student research aspect of our website to the side, but after we talked to this student about his research, we think that we will bring it back. The main reason we were going to take it out of our project was that we were not finding any student research that related to fracking, but that has evidently changed. I’m excited that we don’t have to remove this part of the project from our website, as we originally really wanted to showcase other students’ research to highlight all of the wonderful things the students do here. For the rest of the week, Jess and I are going to conduct our interviews that we have scheduled, write a few more of our informational pages for the website, and then hope to enjoy next weekend, as it is our fall break.