After a relaxing and rejuvenating Spring Break, ALLARM’s student watershed coordinators sprung back into action by visiting Professor Benka-Coker and Professor Douglas’ ENST 162 classes to give presentations on ALLARM’s community science efforts. During the presentation, we introduced ALLARM as an organization to the students and explained our mission, what we do to pursue our goals, and how our goals relate to the realm of community science. Student watershed coordinators also had the opportunity to share their own experiences working with ALLARM.
Ben Connors ‘27:
This event was a great full-circle experience for me, as I initially learned about ALLARM through a class visit. It was very exciting to be on the other side as the one giving the presentation to potential student watershed coordinators. The class was very engaged, and many seemed enthusiastic about the potential of working with ALLARM by asking lots of great questions!
While I started preparing for the class visit a little later than others, I still felt that I had enough time to make my section of the presentation what I wanted it to be. This experience gave me a lot of valuable presenting experience as well, as we were speaking to quite a large group.
Naisha Gaur ’27 also had a lot to take away from this experience as she got to work on her science communication skills and loved introducing ALLARM to new students. In the following weeks, it has been so exciting to see some of these students’ interest in ALLARM. We even get to welcome some of them to the team for the upcoming academic year!
Kristin Houston ‘27:
We took many steps to prepare for the presentation to make it an engaging and valuable experience for the students. My contributions to the presentation were mainly focused on introducing ALLARM as a community science center, sharing our mission and how it relates to our work, and showing how community science benefits citizens and scientists alike, so I did a lot of preparatory work on how to explain community science to those who might not be aware of it. Kailey Sipe ‘25 and Water Quality Technician Lindsay VanFossen, who also presented to Professor Benka-Coker’s class on Tuesday morning, did similar work for their respective topics.
Students who were presenting also participated in rehearsals to get helpful feedback from our partners. Receiving feedback from my peers along with speaking during the presentation itself were valuable moments for me, as I had never participated in a class visit before and had a lot to learn about effective presenting and engaging with an audience as a member of an organization.
Being able to share my own experiences at ALLARM with the students was definitely a highlight of the class visit as well, and I enjoyed interacting with the audience and answering questions as well. I was impressed with the students’ interest in getting involved within their own community and curiosity surrounding our contributions as students.