Claire and I worked on our milestone together, but here is what we have accomplished so far!

For our first milestone, Claire and I planned on setting up the website, creating page tabs and organizing the website, gathering our information and writing the pages we assigned ourselves, contacting students for permission to publish their research, and scheduling all our interviews. As we went around campus, we noticed that there wasn’t as much student research posted as we had originally thought. We contacted a few students, but hadn’t heard back from them. For this reason, we decided to remove the student research portion from our project for the time being. Our hope is to be able to add this back into the website later, as we really wanted to showcase other students’ research. However, at this time, it just doesn’t seem to be working out. IRB was the biggest obstacle we faced throughout this project, but as far as we are aware we have been completely cleared, so we have interviews starting next week! We definitely became discouraged when IRB became a problem, but we tried to keep our heads up high and stay focused on the other aspects of the project that we could get done. In the time that it took for IRB to approve our project, we were able to complete the other aspects of the timeline. For the next two weeks, we are going to conduct as many interviews as we can and we are going to continue writing the informational pages of the website. Even with the IRB set-back, we have been able to keep our project going and we have accomplished what we had wanted to by this point in time.

Besides what is listed above, we went to a COPLAC conference at our university on Friday to support one of our friends who was presenting in the art gallery. We decided to look over the poster presentations as well and stumbled upon a student presenting on an app he had helped designed. This app locates old, abandoned well sites that can pose a threat to the environment and community. After listening to his presentation, we told him about our website and about how we wanted to showcase student research. He was very interested in posting his research, so he gave us his contact information. We found this really exciting because his app is a step towards conflict resolution! There was also another student presenting on cells impacted by water contamination. She also said that she would be willing to have her research posted on our website. Since the students agreed, Claire and I decided to bring back the student research section of our website!
Claire and I also went driving this morning to find well sites that we could take pictures of (which ended up being an adventure since we didn’t know exactly where they were). We learned quickly that the sites are all posted property, so we took pictures of the well site signs to compose a map of a few sites around our county. There were three sites that gave us a perfect view from the road, so we took pictures from a distance! Despite not being able to walk close to the site, we took some great photos that we can use for our map and for background images on our website! Here are two photos from our adventure today:

It has been a very productive weekend thus far and I am looking forward to the interview with Dr. Guignard tomorrow!