Orientation

This will have to be quick, since we're leaving for dinner soon. But, hey! Orientation!

Most of the group met last night at this semi-swanky hotel in an outlying district of San Jose. We went to OTS headquarters today, met all the professors, got some syllabi, did some paperwork, got a few fear-inducing lectures on safety (in the field and in the city).

None of the South Africans (there are two) are here yet, due to plane difficuties. But, from what I can tell, we have a lot of great diversity in the group. Well, I guess we are mostly white kids, and about half from liberal arts schools. But what I mean is that the Americans are from all over the United States, and our academic backgrounds and general experience and interests are quite diverse. We have a natural history buff, a geology major, a pre-dental from Penn, people interested in environmental science and policy, people (like me) more on the ecology side, those who like to try new foods, and those who are more comfortable with hamburgers and fries. I think I can see some purposeful effort put into selecting an interesting mix of students. Which I think will be both challenging and rewarding. Not to sound too much like a brochure or anything.

Tomorrow morning we take the long bus ride to the very southern edge of Costa Rica to our first field station, Las Cruces, in the pre-montane forest. It'll be nice to get out of the city.

Also, I forgot to clarify at the beginning that this is called a "flog" because it's a "field log," a term stolen from the blog for the Echinacea Project, a research project I worked on this past summer. So that's that.