1443 Brightside Drive: Apartment 1132

This is my apartment I have been living in for the last four months and which I will be living in until July 31st next year. I've been living with my French friend Fab and two American roommates we were randomly selected to live with. The apartment complex is huge with something like 15 buildings housing a few hundred people. It's only a 45 minute walk to campus from here, but thankfully it's right on a free LSU bus route meaning just a 15 minute ride on a packed bus. The apartment came fully furnished and with a washing machine, dryer, dishwasher, microwave, oven, fridge etc. There is also a basketball court, tennis court and sand volleyball arena along with a gym, pool, hot tub, and BBQ area. Pets are allowed, which sadly means you want to avoid grass areas. However, all in all it's a fairly nice place to live.

Living here also hasn't been without its dramas, particularly involving one roommate. First, food from the fridge would dissappear. Later on in the semester we would arrive home to find that our rooms looked like they had been searched through and some loose change had disappeared. Next, Fab's French credit card had mysteriously been used to buy €150 of pizza, Chinese food, and other takeaways which could be traced to being ordered from our roommate's cellphone and which we were told had been delivered to our apartment. Our suspicions confirmed, we called the police, who promptly did...nothing. Thankfully, this particular guy was evicted a week later for not paying rent, but not before threatening our other roommate Mo with a gun...

The day after a tropical storm

BIOL 7800 - Biodiversity & Macroecology

My first semester at LSU is quickly coming to a close. It has gone really fast and the work so far has been enjoyable but at times a bit overwhelming. The highlight so far was the final class of my biodiversity and macroecology course I talked about in an earlier post. The final class consisted of a 15 minute presentation by each student on a project related to the class content which they had been working on during the semester. So, on Wednesday morning we sat through four hours of twelve really high quality presentations on some diverse and interesting topics. Now I only have my final statistics exam early next week and the semester will be officially over!

I've embedded the presentation I gave in this blog post because it's some work I'm pretty proud of. I spent many hours slaving over the data and various data analysis programs to get the results that I did. My presentation was pretty well received by the rest of my class judging by the comments they gave me, I just hope my grade will reflect that too! Hopefully the main points of my research are able to be understood by those without an ecology background, or you can even just enjoy the great photographs! There's still a huge amount of further analysis that can be done on this and the many other kinds of data we collected during the field work for this project; it's exciting to think of what interesting patterns we may uncover. However, for now it's definitely interesting to find that restoration of native sand dunes is not largely altering their beetle assemblages, although we may still find evidence to dispute this.

Make sure you view it in full screen by clicking the icon on the bottom right of the powerpoint slides.

My First Classes

Teaching is over for the semester! Yesterday and today I gave my two classes their final exams for the semester, and now I feel like I have a huge weight off my shoulders, other than having to mark the exams of course...This was my first time teaching any sort of class, and somewhat surprisingly I really enjoyed it. The interaction with the students was great, most were really eager to learn, and most of all I felt like I did a pretty good job as a teacher. The students in both classes which I taught were a lot of fun, despite those in the 6:30 - 9:30 pm class on Wednesday always wanting to get out early! I hope they had fun in the lab and learnt a lot in the process, even if introduction biology can be brutally boring at times. Here are my class photos:

Section 38 - Wednesday 6:30 - 9:30 pm

Section 39 - Thursday 9 am - 12 pm