Martel's S/STEM TRAIN Blog (2/24)

This week has been extremely busy for me. I attended a meeting of the EIDC committee, a cross-college meeting to plan and draft a district-wide Tribal Land Acknowledgement, and a meeting between me, another student senator, and a member of the district team leading the 4-year degree programs at the MCCCD to collaborate on a 4-year degree survey to get student feedback on the degree offerings. I had to spend a significant amount of time working with the Presidential Search Committee at PC, and I have to attend a 5-hour meeting for this committee tomorrow. I also led a meeting of the Student Senate tonight. On top of this, I had to take an economics final and take several quizzes and projects in my classes, prepare for upcoming midterms in several of my classes, and fill out a number of college applications.

All of these activities made it difficult to conduct much research for my S/STEM TRAIN project this week. But, I did some additional reading on the logic of Aristotle and its connection to mathematics.

Hopefully, in the coming weeks, and especially once I've finished midterms, I'll have the ability to devote more energy to my research.

On a brighter note, this week I was accepted into the Critical Languages Institute at the Melikian Center at ASU. This is an accelerated foreign language summer program where I'll be studying 1st year Russian. I've been looking forward to hearing back from the program for several months and I'm very excited to have the chance to participate in this incredible program. I was also offered a substantial scholarship that will completely cover the expenses of the program. This week, I also received acceptance into an industrial assessments internship program at ASU. This STEM program helps to conduct environmental assessments on businesses throughout Phoenix to help them reduce their energy consumption and reduce their ecological footprint. I'm very excited for this program as well, as it will allow me to gain more experience working in a professional STEM environment while making a significant contribution to the fight against climate change. The program also offers its participants free housing on the ASU Tempe campus, which is another major bonus!