Summary: Adirondacks Development Project

On October of 2007, my Environmental Studies professor assigned her class into 6 different groups by numbers. I’m in “Group 2”, which is consisted into 5 people while the rest of the groups had 4 people each. The people in my group are: Annie (our group leader), Jeremy, Matt, Spencer, and me. Each group had to pick topics on the environmental issues with the Adirondacks region (also part of the North Country). Our topic for the group is “Development in the Adirondacks”. After the group placements, Group 2 started picking up articles left and right from their dorms and computer labs (including at the libraries), so did I. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, we meet in the library – the Crumb Library – only in the evenings from 7PM to 9PM. Our topic talks about this issue in Economic, Social, Cultural, Political, and Biophysical perspectives and what are the recommendations/alternative solutions for it.

Annie, our group leader, made the slides for the presentation. Matt, Jeremy, Spencer, and I made slides for our subtopics to make them collaborate all together. My subtopic was Political Dimensions. The six slides I’ve made were 4 issues including two New York State court cases, one development project, and one management plan. All of them ranged from the late 1990s thru current because I don’t want to list the ones from the 1970s and 1980s. I’m very familiar with the 1990s cases, so I picked them. On our last day of studying – Tuesday November 13, we handed in the finished slides to Annie and the number of the slides went well over 45 or 46. We had so much slides she deleted a tiny portion of them. An hour later, we rehearsed our presentation and the timing came out to 19 minutes and a few seconds at least.

The next day, November 14 was the day of our presentation. It lasted exactly 20 minutes and a few seconds due to the fact that we have some extra information on each slide and a very large map of the Adirondacks that Annie rented from the library. It was fun, but it was nerve-wrecking at the same time. After that, we had a 5-minute Q&A session that lasted less than 5 minutes. Annie and I had the most questions. It’s been a while since I’ve gave in a presentation to the class, but at least I did much better than last year. That’s probably because it was my first year in Potsdam last year. This is my second year and I’m going to do a way better group presentation just like the Development project. I think our group did awesome. We’ve put more than just a ton of effort into this project and the 20-minute presentation – we’ve put a lot of information and our time into it.