Category: Erin Jackson (page 1 of 4)

TBT: “A Little Love for the Library” by Erin Jackson

As we get closer to Finals week here at UD, please enjoy this Throwback Thursday post about Morris Library written by Erin Jackson in 2018. Through humorous anecdotes, Erin describes the sense of community and some of the many resources Morris has to offer.

Though we have all been to the Hugh Morris Library at some point by now, the building holds a different meaning for all of its attendees. For some people it is the only place they can get work done; for others it’s the ultimate destination for group projects. Some people go there as a social event, and still others use it as a way to escape the noise of an active college community. For a while, I had no idea where I fit in among these classifications of library-goers. It started out as a necessary destination whenever I needed to print something before I invested in a printer of my own. Then, after my first semester of freshman year when my laptop somehow got blacklisted from the UD internet for reasons unknown to this day, I again was forced to the library to either rent a laptop or spend time there on their desktops, knowing that someday I’d again have a functional laptop and could have more control over my study location.

It was not for a while that I began attending the library out of choice instead of necessity. I would occasionally go to the reading room between classes, or wander around the third floor until I found a rare empty seat, afraid to cough or breathe too loudly and disrupt the population already there. Even then, I felt a little lost, not having a spot of my own, a routine location I could count on. I still didn’t fit into any of my pre-determined library stereotypes, but I kept trying.

Continue reading

“The Pros and Cons of a Virtual Existence” by Erin Jackson

Keeping in touch with people when they’re not in the same room as me has never been my strong suit. As a senior, I was already worried about maintaining long-distance relationships with the people who have been walking distance from me for the past four years. Now that our time together has come to a screeching halt months earlier than planned, I am at a loss for how to salvage these friendships, some that were just beginning to grow. However, with one text from my roommate, I began to think hope might not all be lost.

Freshman year, my roommates and I stuck around for winter session. Along with some other scattered friends throughout our floor and others in Redding, we got caught up in an epidemic of our own creation: an obsession with Words with Friends. I don’t remember how it started or how it ended, but I can clearly picture drawn out meals in Kent dining hall, sitting across from friends who became my virtual opponents. Meals would last hours as we got caught up competing for the longest word, while making every effort to block the triple word spaces that could be used against us. One game per friend wasn’t enough either. We each easily had two or three games between us at a time, and we would immediately begin a rematch each time a game ended. The individual games were impossible to keep track of, making it hard to remember who won and who lost. The perfect combination of luck, strategy, and skill, Words with Friends kept our minds sharp as we procrastinated those long winter days away.

Like I said, I don’t know how it ended, but in the past three years since that first winter session, I haven’t even thought about the game. In fact, when my roommate texted me in the first week of the quarantine, asking me if I wanted to start up the addiction once more, I had to redownload the app. What started as a friendly game between my roommate and me took on the same momentum it did our freshman year. As the games and opponents started to increase exponentially, spreading contagiously throughout households and across state borders, the expectations kept rising. While ten and twenty-point words were acceptable at the beginning, I now find it hard to settle for anything less than thirty. There’s a sort of excitement that comes with breaking forty, fifty, sixty points, accompanied with not seeing your opponent in person but feeling them exact their revenge in a torrent of tiles overlapping with your own. Continue reading

“Composting on UD’s Webb Farm” by Erin Jackson

NEWARK, Delaware – A fifteen-minute walk from University of Delaware’s main campus transports students from the crowded sidewalks overflowing with construction to an oasis of peace, quietude, and UDairy ice cream on the university’s 350-acre outdoor classroom—the farm. This agricultural and environmental sanctuary just across the bridge on South College Avenue delivers an initially shocking aroma. On a working farm, there are large volumes of animals producing—as they do—large volumes of manure. However, this manure is good for more than just keeping the crowds at bay. With the right equipment and space, it becomes the fertilizer that keeps the farm functioning. 

“It’s all part of the cycle,” explains Webb Farm manager Larry Armstrong. “What they make in the farm goes in the field [where] they graze.” Fifty Dorset sheep, thirty Angus beef cattle, and six teaching horses live on Webb Farm, all of which are managed by Mr. Armstrong. However, in his position, he serves as the caretaker for more than just the animals themselves as he also maintains the health of the land they rely on.

As someone who has been in agriculture his whole life, Mr. Armstrong sees value in products that others would initially dismiss as waste and waste alone. Whether it’s the piles of leaves that have fallen on the farm, the excess straw spilling out of horse stalls, or the physical waste piling up as the livestock convert food into energy—all of it gets raked, swept, and scraped up into skinny piles called windrows for composting.

Continue reading

“Caring for CompAnimals” by Erin Jackson

About one year ago, I lost a best friend: my fifteen-and-a-half-year-old beagle named Billy Bob. Being only twenty myself at the time, that meant that I hadn’t been without Billy Bob since I was four. I had no idea how I was going to survive without him when I literally could not remember what my life was like before he was in it. He completed our family, made every Christmas card picture, and warmed his way into the hearts of everyone who met him. He cured me of my fear of dogs the day I met him when he ran right up to me and licked me in the face, and now I am headed towards a career in veterinary medicine. While I miss him dearly and could write about him for pages on end, that is not what this post is about. This post is about other dogs like him. While there will never be a dog exactly like him, there are countless dogs out there who are full of love and special in their own ways. And unfortunately, a good number of them are without a forever home. Continue reading

“Pigs 101” by Erin Jackson

I never expected to show up to my first day of my senior capstone class and receive a laptop sticker and a light-up key chain from my professor. Both of these souvenirs were in the shape of a pig, and the pig even had the quote “Pigs are cool” emblazoned on its side in all caps, mirroring the message my instructor left us with at the end of her introductory email. For context, I am majoring in pre-veterinary medicine, and the course I am enrolled in for my senior capstone is entitled “Swine Production.”

In this course, we are split into small groups entirely responsible for the care and well-being of a pregnant sow. We are expected to be there when our sow gives birth, which in pig jargon is called “farrowing,” and are henceforth responsible for the health of her litter of piglets. Essentially, this class is the culmination of all the courses I have taken throughout my college experience. I do not think I ever actually recognized how much I was learning while I was learning it. I took classes freshman year that built on my high school knowledge. Sophomore year, I took classes that built on my freshman year knowledge, and the pattern continued on into junior and senior year. Somewhere along the way, I managed to build quite a foundation of knowledge regarding animal health without realizing that it was happening. Learning can be funny that way – you may learn something for the first time, and then hear about it again in various forms throughout a multitude of courses, all the while not realizing how your understanding of it grows each time you learn it. Another way that I have discovered just how much I have learned up to this point is in my ability to share it with others. In the Honors section of this course, each senior Honors student serves as a mentor for a couple of freshman Honors students. We introduce them to our pigs and invite them to watch the miracle of life, which may include Ubering them to the barn at any hour of the night and letting them cut some umbilical cords if they are lucky. We update them on what we learn in lecture about various aspects of swine reproductive physiology and health concerns, and we introduce them to what it is like to be a pre-veterinary student at UD.

Sometimes I forget what is normal to talk about at the dinner table and what I should refrain from saying around my less animal-inclined acquaintances. I have found that some people just get it, and others do not. To engineers, a capstone requires a project where you are building something; to wildlife conservation majors, the course involves writing a personalized management plan. These seem to many students more of the conventional paths to follow in taking the quintessential course of one’s college career. I am thrilled that my experience has been so much more. Not only am I given the respect of being charged with an animal’s quality of life, as well as her fifteen to twenty-seven children (the accurate range of litter sizes within the class), but I am also allowed to open this course up to my friends and family, as well as the public, to educate them on relevant issues in animal health and welfare. Our teacher encourages us to educate any guests we bring to the barn on what we have learned, and I had the time of my life bringing my family in to meet my pigs this weekend. They even got over the smell enough to hang out with me for an hour, likely to experience in person what I have been bombarding them with in pictures for over a month now.

This class has challenged me on multiple levels. Piglets do not live a life of luxury, as cute and playful and seemingly perfect as they seem. Not all of them even make it into the world alive, and the ones that do must overcome enormous odds to make it to the stage of weaning, even with thirty eager pre-veterinary students tending to their every need. This morning I faced one of the hardest parts of the class thus far when I had to say good-bye to my sow. Our teacher told us not to get attached to our sows, even encouraging us to name them after a food product coming from pork so that we would not forget where they were going after our class. However, it was obviously not that easy. While it was hard for us humans to bid farewell to the first and likely the largest production animal we had spent the last month of our lives bonding with, the piglets were fine. Their mother had been their main and vital source of food for their entire lives, and all of a sudden she was replaced with a bucket of grain. Some of the piglets responding by diving for the grain instantaneously, while others took advantage of the increased space in their crate to run around and play. This response was another unexpected learning experience I am grateful for in this course.

I am going to be devastated at the end of this course, and not just because I’ll have to say goodbye to the first nine lovely beings that I saw brought into this earth. This class marks the end of an era in my learning; I have come full circle, even mentoring the freshmen whose same shoes I stood in only three years ago. And I have not made it here alone. My major and future career are built on reliance on others, and I will never not be working in a team. I have traveled throughout my undergraduate experience with largely the same group of individuals, and sharing this final experience together is making me nostalgic in a way that represents how I feel about college coming to an end. I know I will continue to bond with people the only way I know how: over a shared love of animals. While I will miss this course and the friends in it, I will carry with me the lessons learned and many adorable pictures of pigs for the rest of my career.

Older posts

© 2024

Theme by Anders NorenUp ↑

Skip to toolbar