My name is Ayelet Roller and I am double majoring in Business and Philosophy. I am interested in business management and public administration, but may just end up being a lawyer.

 I expect to learn about how people learn about science. Education was a possible major for me, and pedagogy as a subject interests me. I particularly like how we are going to be learning about informal settings. So much of what we learn does not come from a classroom. I am curious to read and research how that process happens. I think this class will help me accomplish my goals by focusing on non-profit institutions, like museums and pubic gardens. Though I am a business major, the corporate sector is not really what interests me. I work and volunteer for non-profits, and learning about the way they service the public should prepare me for future career options. I also worked in a museum for a summer as an assistant teacher, so it will be interesting to see how that compares to the findings in this class.

 During the BioBlitz, I looked at flora, which is a fancy word for plants. I was in charge of writing and documenting all the different types of plants we saw. Finding different plants and writing them down was crucial to the goals of the BioBlitz. We needed to see what has changed in the ecosystem of the park in the last ten years, and finding and recording all the plants can show what has changed and what ahs remained the same.

 The woman who led our group was extremely knowledgeable and shared her reasons for participating in the BioBlitz. She now teaches in a college, but prior to finishing her PhD, she worked for the Central Park Conservancy. She started as a gardener, and worked her way up to becoming in charge of all the gardeners! She had only left the park in the last couple of years, and everyone we passed knew who she was. She was participating in the BioBlitz because she had been a part of it ten years ago, and wanted to come back and see what had changed. She was extremely interesting and I feel very honored to have been in her group.

This activity benefits the citizens of New York by understanding one of the largest tracts of land on the island of Manhattan. Though the city did not look anything like the park before it was settled and built up, when walking through the park you can only imagine what Manhattan must have looked like 300 years ago. Knowing where you came from, and understanding the beauty of the land that we developed is important for the future of the earth as a whole. We need to treat the land that we live on better, and to do that you have to understand and appreciate it.

I enjoyed the BioBlitz. I did not think I would, so it surprised me when I did at the end. I liked how we got to experience Central Park, which is such a fixture in the city, in a totally new way. I was surprised at how easy it was to distinguish between all the different trees and plants. I thought it would be much more difficult than it was. I did not like how hot it was, and how we stayed in such a concentrated area of the park, but I would still participate in activities like this in the future.

P.S. I dont know how to find my groups photos on iNaturalist, but I am working on it! And I dont have any pictures of my own, because I didnt have a smart phone before last week. Sorry!