Park Adventure!

After my first two weeks of research I have done so much yet so little at the same time. I, Herman Recendiz, am begin to learn how much work you can get done in two weeks when it becomes your job. Two weeks ago I came into the chemistry computer lab without any idea as to what I would be doing. Of course I had a general idea about my research, but I didn’t know how we were going to get up and running. At first nothing felt tangible. I was working and making progress at the start of my first week, but I couldn’t connect the dots to my research. It was a bit scary because I was working in metaphorical darkness without a clear picture of my end goal for the 10 weeks. By the end of my first week, that would all change.

After a few days of planning with Deanna and my lab partner Gillian Buckardt, we figured out which parks in the Appleton area we wanted to visit in order to inspect whether or not each location was viable for our research. For some context, we could not set up our instruments at our originally planned location due to some unforeseen issues, so our task for the first week was to find new locations that we could use to collect data. We agreed that parks would be the best locations to work in due to their open nature and the fact that they are public spaces. Here is an image of the many parks we decided to visit:

Note: all the locations are public parks expect for C3 (forested area) and E1 (neighborhood with no obvious air pollution source)

Using the EJScreen website provided by the EPA, we chose these parks based on a few different factors such as proximity to a point source (An area tagged by the EPA as a source of air pollution), demographics of surrounding neighborhood, and distance from other selected parks. Once we had all this information we went on our expedition to visit the parks and narrow down our large list. Starting from Lawrence University we headed northeast to our first location then moved west along the northernmost parks. Afterwards we headed back East to visit the southernmost parks and ended off by visiting the on campus locations (SLUG [A1] and the Banta Bowl [A2]). At each location, we looked for areas where we could set up instrumentation without being in the way of the park visitors. We mainly looked for space in parking spots, wide streets, or areas near picnic tables/ park pavilions. After checking out each park these are the locations we chose:

We had been able to cut down our list to 8 locations which seemed more feasible for the 10 weeks we have.

Over a week later I look back at this experience as my first major step into becoming a researcher. Suddenly my work makes sense and everything is starting to connect. This was certainly a big step forward in our project and a way to build my confidence going into the future.

-Herman Recendiz