If I could only describe the Brackenridge Fellowship in two words, I would have to say it is “research demystified.” Before the fellowship, I had only engaged with the research process in a class context: projects and experiments I didn’t plan on extending past a single semester or presenting to an audience outside of my…
Author: Lillian Taylor
Found in Translation: Communicating My Research
Last weekend, I had the opportunity to work at a conference in my field. Even though I wasn’t presenting my research, I still networked with researchers, teachers, and publishers and got the chance to talk about the history research I’m doing through the Brackenridge Fellowship. Throughout this experience, I realized that the way I explained…
Interdisciplinary Conversations: My Brackenridge Cohort
In the first few weeks of the Brackenridge Fellowship, our weekly seminars have been focused on building a common understanding of what research is and how to approach research from interdisciplinary angles. This week, we were able to talk about interdisciplinary research in our official cohorts, smaller groups within the Brackenridge fellowship with a mix…
Brackenridge Introduction: Lillian Taylor
Hi to everyone in the Pitt Honors blog community! My name is Lilly Taylor, and I’m a rising senior majoring in environmental science with a minor in history. Through the Brackenridge Fellowship this summer, I will be studying how climate change, specifically climate cooling, in the New England region during the seventeenth century affected British…
Wyoming Spring Creek- How Much Can Six Weeks Really Change You?
When we had our pre-departure meeting back in April, our program coordinators and instructors joked about the culture shock we would experience going from the east coast to Wyoming and back again. I couldn’t imagine then that I would feel much of a difference at all. It’s all the same country, I thought to myself,…
Wyoming Spring Creek: Hot Springs, Bison, and People
Throughout the course, we’ve used a combination of geological, ecological, and human-centered perspectives to understand the world we live in, and we continued to take this interdisciplinary approach in Yellowstone on day 7 of our 10-day road trip across Wyoming. Our first official stop of the day was an overlook at Yellowstone Lake which formed…
Wyoming Spring Creek: A Tale of Two Wetlands
One of the reasons I decided to apply to the Spring Creek Field Studies Program was to learn more deeply about how Earth systems interact to shape the world we see in front of us. Over the first half of the course, I was fascinated by the different plant communities we saw on the preserve…
Wyoming Spring Creek: Patterns Etched in Stone … and Bone
On the windblown and weathered surface of the Spring Creek Preserve, belemnites and vertebrae from dinosaurs litter the ground. It is easy to focus on the sheer wonder of finding a fossil, then another, then a cluster, transporting you back to the times of the Jurassic or the ancient seas that once covered Wyoming. To…
Wyoming Spring Creek – The Culture in Cattle Ranching
The first thing I noticed when I got to Laramie was the importance of cowboys. Walking around the University of Wyoming campus, you see cowboy statues everywhere, which makes sense given that the school’s mascot is a cowboy. Even beyond the campus though, the silhouette of a cowboy on his horse is emblazoned across the…
Wyoming Spring Creek – Stories Told Through Senses
The vast, mostly uninterrupted space of the Wyoming prairie is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. It is easy to get lost in the view of the land stretching for miles and miles until it touches the sky. The sun rose to my left as I sat looking at a cliff on Saturday morning, and…