ESPP Students Win Best Student Poster Award

Contact: Jessica A. Knoblauch, News Writer for Environmental Science and Policy Program: (517) 432-3823 or knoblau7@msu.edu

November 20, 2006

Congratulations to Michigan State University students Nicole Lamp, Alexandra Felix and Rebecca Christoffel on winning Best Student Poster Award at the 13th annual conference of The Wildlife Society!

The Wildlife Society, whose conference was held in Anchorage, Ala., is an international non-profit scientific and educational association dedicated to excellence in wildlife stewardship through science and education. Lamp presented the poster at the conference this past September.

The title of the poster is “Development of a Natural Resources Field Course: Shaping Future Professionals through Experiential Learning and Teaching.” The poster was based on evaluations from a new class that the students developed and taught this past May.

The class was made possible through a two-year grant awarded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which allowed the graduate students, who are in the Fisheries and Wildlife Department, to develop and teach a course that focused on giving MSU students more field experience. Fisheries and Wildlife faculty members Dan Kramer, Dan Hayes, Lois Wolfson, Kelly Millenbah and Rique Campa were co-PIs on the grant and guided the students on course development and implementation.

“We noticed that the upper-level undergraduate students in the department had limited experience in field techniques,” says Lamp, “so we decided to design a course that would allow for experiences like that early on in their curriculum.”

The class, called Introductory Fisheries and Wildlife Field Experience, is a two-week intensive course that is targeted for sophomore-level students who don’t yet have outdoor field experience. Held from 7:30 a.m. to 6 at night, the students in the class were in the field every day learning about techniques for capturing animals and identifying them. “It’s important to have hands on experience with animals and the habitats that they depend on,” says Lamp.

Lamp, Felix and Christoffel also wanted to provide networking opportunities for the students, so they invited guest lecturers to come speak to the class about their experiences. “Everyone from faculty members to wildlife experts from the USDA Wildlife Services, Michigan Department of Natural Resources and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was there,” says Lamp.

Comments on the poster taken from students in the class demonstrate the course’s success. One comment reads, “I learned more [these] past 12 days than I probably would’ve learned all year in a classroom!”

The class, with course number FW 238, will be offered again this May and Lamp hopes that MSU will continue to offer the course in the future. Says Lamp, “Though we were all pretty exhausted by the end, we had a great time with it, and the students did too.”