3rd Blog Post

 1. What are your professional goals, 1 year, 5 years and 10 years into the future? What will accomplishing these goals let you do? How will accomplishing these goals impact those around you and what will it make possible for those in your community? 

    I think that my professional goals are pretty basic and they won't change over the course of the next 10 years. My goal professionally is to be in a stable career that is low-stress and involves the thing that I love most, plants. That may take a masters degree, but I'm still trying to figure that out. I'm currently looking at working in a herbarium, so in order to get there I need to experience an internship with one or more herbariums, and luckily I already have one lined up for the summer. There are zero people who will be impacted by any of my decisions as usual. As far as my community impact, I'm not sure there will be an impact to my immediate community, however, the scientific community might benefit from my work in a herbarium as it is becoming digitized and will allow researchers from all around the world the ability to access information on plant specimens that I have worked on.

2. What are societal challenges that matter to you that you think it's important to deal with now? What do you think are the challenges that will matter 10 years in the future, and 20 years in the future? How do you think these challenges will be addressed, and what will need to happen to make sure that they are?

   Climate change is a challenge that is important to me, but I'm not optimistic about it at all. I don't think that we have the collective will to change our habits to meet the challenge, especially when money talks louder than everything else. There are many companies and countries that are making a lot of noise about the action that they are taking to combat it, but in reality it's lip-service or marketing and very little gets done, I think the future will be more of the same. Lying to ourselves is something humans do very well.

3. What is something that makes you optimistic about the future, and why? This could be something big and impersonal (improving price of Li-ion batteries) or something small and personal (a new pet). Please describe how it feels to focus on this thing that makes you optimistic, and discuss whether you think it is a good idea to be intentional about being optimistic. 

    I'm optimistic about building a green house for myself. I'm looking forward to being able to use a section of my backyard to use for plant propagation and the care of plants that are not tolerant of the desert climate. This project is always in the back of my mind because I haven't been able to focus on it while the semester is going on. Thinking about it doesn't necessarily put me in a different mood or anything, it will bring me joy once it's completed, but until then it's just an item on a checklist.