top of page

Sophomore Inspire Week

        During this week, A few peers and I had the opportunity to go work with Durango nature studies and Open Space Conservation and help them create a social media publicity campaign. We did this by first learning about what their operations did for the community, and what conservation easements are. Conservation easements are documents that you can attach to your land that restrict yours from dividing up and developing your private land. This helps keep private lands in town from being overdeveloped. Without these documents, Durango would not be the natural place that it currently is, and places like Dalla Mountain Park (Sailing Hawks to the local) from being developed and destroyed.

        The second day we went out to Sailing Hawks and took pictures to edit, tag, hashtag, and caption for Open Space Conservancy's Instagram page. this was a very fun operation because we were able to spend a day outside and use our knowledge as high schoolers in this social media driven world, to help their organization with their online presence and publicity. The video that I created for them is attached below.

Reflection:

Learning:

What I learned during this process was a lot about the legality and politics behind conserving local land, and especially on private lands. I always thought that private lands were somewhat untouchable in terms of conservation and that the landowner could do anything they wanted with that land, but as it turns out, there are many landowners that are taking steps towards conservation in the Durango area. they are doing this by placing conservation easements on their land, which prohibit them, or any future owners of that land, from building and developing anything other than what was initially negotiated in the document. I think that that is the most interest ting piece of conservation easements that is valuable to know, that they cannot be removed and they stay attached to that land indefinitely (Meaning they would only really go away if the government collapsed).

 

Career and Future:

over the past two years, I have taken multiple career cluster surveys which determined some of the careers that I might be interested in(you can find my results in the Naviance Survey Results tab under the College/Career prep tab). A few of these career clusters that I am most interested in are art/entertainment, which would tie in mostly to my interest in filmmaking and entertaining people. Another career path that I am interested in emergency medicine, such as a paramedic or EMT. I have found an interest in these fields based on the experiences of myself and my dad. My own experiences have been that I currently work as a lifeguard, and there are a lot of emergency medical certifications that are required for that job, including CPR/AED and First Aid. My dad's experiences with this have been through volunteering with Firefighting programs, as well as paramedic and EMT through Silverton. The final career cluster that I have been interested in is STEM because this career cluster is tied in with Astronomy and Astrophysics, which is a major interest of mine.

bottom of page