Jaron Brown
This year’s Mexico Study abroad class gave me many opportunities to learn and grow in ways I didn’t really think about before I joined the class. Before the class was really underway, I had only imagined learning the technical vocabulary, getting in some real world application of skills developed in the classrooms, and having some fun while at it. I had previously not thought about the teamwork development that I gained; and now in hindsight I realize that the difference in learning experiences in the classroom and in practice are vastly different.
I feel that I learned a lot about teamwork. Usually when I’m on a team with other people I try to do it all if I feel like someone isn’t really doing something as fast or as well as I think it might need to be done. This time I felt like each of the members of my team (Derek Lounsbury and Josh Draper) brought a different set of skills and we were pretty successful at breaking up tasks and each doing what they were most suited for. Then when we reviewed each other’s work, it was good to get the others’ perspective and grasp things that may have slipped by the person whose work was being reviewed.
One of main lessons I am taking away from this semester is the realization that classroom ideology and real world application aren’t always exactly the same. In a homework problem we might need a CN number or something and look it up in a table without much thought if it is a good one or not. Turns out the CN numbers we had originally used in our model were not representative of the area we were modeling (even though they came from a “legitimate” table and would have been useful for a homework assignment); this meant going back and changing some values in our working model. Being able to go out into the areas we were modeling was also very helpful; finally we could see what we had been looking at in photos and on Google Earth for so long.
I guess I can’t not say anything about the fun we had either: we did, and a ton of it. I don’t know if it was just our particular group or what, but I made a bunch of new friends and had a great time all the time.
I was surprised to
find myself and a few of the other students one night trying to grasp the
social and political differences that lead to such things as wastewater for a
major city winding up untreated in a canyon that rivals the Grand Canyon. The day we saw the