S-STEM/TRAIN Scholar Christopher Livingston's Blog

This semester I transferred to ASU as a junior. Since being young I have imagined myself attending a university but never really thinking it would come to fruition. I spent many years thinking that college wasn't for me and for many years that thinking won out over reason. Tough times can cause you to change your mind about the things you think you know about yourself (I think we normally call this hitting rock bottom... but you don't have to hit the bottom to know things need to change). Each of us has waged our own internal battles throughout our lives... our self doubts can become an intoxicating miasma of despair. So, before the nation faced its own battles by an onslaught of ridiculousness, which we will remember with disdain and embarrassment for years to come, I was inside my own head... sowing the seeds of distrust in my own abilities, questioning my worth, chipping away at my own confidence (destructive habits seem to be having a field day in the US for the past four y...

The semester is coming to a close very soon and although it felt like it's taken forever it also feels like it went very fast. This is my last semester at Phoenix College (although I'll be back for another chemistry class at some point). Being a student again has been an amazing experience for me, every aspect of my life has changed since I decided to come back to school and sometimes I'm not sure who I am anymore... but there is nothing I regret and I'm coming to like the new me the more I get to know him. It takes courage to make life changing decisions, and it takes courage to see your commitments through and nobody tells you how scary and difficult the process of destroying yourself to build a better you is. I'm sure nobody expected this semester to turn out as it has, I think about how we've had to adapt to make things work and that the tools that we've utilized to adapt have been because of advancements we've made in the past decade. There is no wa...

Happy April 23rd fellow research students! This week I was able to get a hold of my insect samples that were collected from the Phoenix College garden earlier in the semester. They are currently 'chilling' in my freezer, waiting for me to further separate and classify them for the research project. Having these samples will help me to do much more work on my paper than I would have been able to do without them, so thank you Matt for coordinating a safe hand-off of the samples to me. As we continue our isolation indoors I hope that everyone is doing well and has plenty of nutritious food and stimulating activities. Please take care of yourselves, I will see you all on the other side of this pandemic!

Hopefully everyone is doing well out there. This week things seemed to start moving along with my classes. I have been getting in touch with some contacts from my physics and chemistry classes so we can struggle through this ordeal together and it seems to be paying off. After speaking with Matt I have a good idea of how my research project is going to proceed, so that is a relief. My paper will probably only have a partial conclusion but I think that should be just fine given the situation. It seems our beautiful extended spring may be getting ready to depart us, so if you have any big projects to get done in your yard this weekend might be your last good shot at it. Take care guys. More flowers from my yard:                  

So, we've been away from school for some weeks now and trying to get back into the swing is going to be difficult. A couple of my classes are going fine online and I don't see any problem with completing them in the future. The rest of my classes are not going as smoothly though, either it's a problem with transitioning to online format for the instructor... or because the instructor communicates very little to the students (which was also the case while we were still coming to class). I really don't know if I'll be able to pass some of those classes online. I at least felt like I had some sort of control over my grade when I was able to physically attend class... now, not so much. Hopefully things work out. Attached is a picture of this blog being written on my laptop.

This week I began sifting through my pitfall traps. Removing large debris from the collection yielded about a tablespoon of small material to sift through. Using a microscope and some tweezers I was able to locate an incredible amount of insects, at least 30 insects from each collection (there have been two collections done so far). My task was to separate the insects according to the orders that they belong to using a dichotomous key. So far I have been able to identify orders such as Coleoptera, Hymenoptera, Araneae, Diptera... etc. These insects are very, very small so the biggest challenge I faced this week was overcoming the force of static electricity under the microscope while looking at the insects, the wrong movement could cause the insect to slingshot across the petri-dish a few inches, but at that magnification it may as well have been propelled a mile away. I found a large amount of Diptera larvae which Dr. Ortiz identified as soldier fly larvae (picture attached). This has...

Technically spring doesn't officially start until March 19th this year, but since we are in AZ and everything is blooming and trees are leafing out so I think it is safe to call it spring. Since my future will revolve around plants, spring has become a favorite season of mine. I enjoy watching the transformation that the landscape undergoes and seeing the new blossoms tempting the bees out for full days of work. In my own yard I am observing the trees turning green, the clover is growing tall, and to my excitement the daffodils that I planted last year have sprung up and already have a bloom. I have attached a picture of the daffodil and also some other blooms in my yard: Freesia, Snapdragons, Azaleas, and an ornamental Kale that has bolted but not yet bloomed. This week has been jam packed with things going on which makes sense since we are roughly half-way through the semester. This weekend I will be participating in the Arizona WET Project where community volunteers, usually mas...