The School for Field Studies in Kenya and Tanzania, East Africa

I spent the fall semester of 2010 in East Africa with the School for Field Studies, studying wildlife management and ecology in the two countries while living in various field camps. This was an incredible experience where I feel like I was challenged both culturally and academically, and in which I learned incredible amounts through true hands-on, field-based research. This included safaris, vegetation exercises/transects, mammal counts, and field interviews, to name a few. The culminating project for the semester was a month-long Directed Research (DR), which I did under the guidance of the Environmental Policy faculty member. My DR focused on the viability of pastoralism as a livelihood in the region, both from a conservation and economic standpoint. We did ten days of field research with local guides in which we conducted 275 interviews, and then spent multiple days analyzing this data, looking for significant relationships between different variables in the pastoral livelihood. The final project was both a large paper and, more rewardingly, a presentation to community members and officials of our research findings, with suggestions for how it can be used and applied.