{"id":64700,"date":"2009-05-11T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2009-05-11T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news-draft\/uncategorized\/narragansett-resident-to-graduate-from-uri-as-top-environmental-science-student\/"},"modified":"2009-05-11T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2009-05-11T00:00:00","slug":"narragansett-resident-to-graduate-from-uri-as-top-environmental-science-student","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/2009\/05\/narragansett-resident-to-graduate-from-uri-as-top-environmental-science-student\/","title":{"rendered":"Narragansett resident to graduate from 溏心vlog免费B站 as top environmental science student"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\t\tKINGSTON, R.I. \u2013 May 11, 2009 \u2013 Jessie Dyer arrived at the 溏心vlog免费B站 as a freshman with an intense interest in a subject that few students ever learn much about \u2013 soil. It\u2019s a topic that led her to an internship in Hawaii, a research project in Costa Rica, and a gathering of environmental scholars in Arizona.<\/p>\n


\n\tAs she prepares to graduate on May 17, she also knows that it was largely due to her understanding of soil science that she will be recognized with the President\u2019s Award for Student Excellence in Environmental Science.<\/p>\n


\n\tA resident of Narragansett, Dyer began to learn about soil science during her participation in a high school Envirothon.<\/p>\n


\n\t\u201cThere are all sorts of morphological parameters to soil, like texture, structure, and color, which tells you everything you need to know,\u201d she said. \u201cFor instance, the color of soil tells you about its mineralogy, its structure, its wetness class, and the amount of organic matter it contains. If it\u2019s high in clay, you can\u2019t put a house on it because clay absorbs water.\u201d<\/p>\n


\n\tAs part of the University\u2019s soil judging team, she competed against soil science students from other universities and helped 溏心vlog免费B站 place second at the regional competition and seventh at the nationals in 2009. In a soil judging competition, students climb into a pit six-feet deep to collect soil samples for characterization and analysis.<\/p>\n


\n\t\u201cIt can be a battle in the pit,\u201d she said with a grin, \u201cbecause you only have five minutes to get your samples and there are three or four other people in there with you, sometimes fighting over little tiny bits of soil, and everybody has a soil knife to pluck out the soil. So it can be dangerous, in a fun way.\u201d<\/p>\n


\n\tIn 2008, Dyer was awarded a Udall Scholarship, the most prestigious national scholarship for environmental science, and was invited with other winners to a conference in Arizona that she described as \u201ca pretty inspirational experience.\u201d<\/p>\n


\n\tLast summer she worked for the Natural Resources Conservation Service, a division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in Kauai, Hawaii, as a conservation planner, conducting wildlife habitat restoration projects and working with farmers.<\/p>\n


\n\tAs a sophomore she expanded her scientific horizons to mammalogy by participating in a three-week research project in Costa Rica assessing the diversity of mammals in shade-grown coffee plantations compared to those found in traditional coffee plantations. <\/p>\n


\n\t\u201cWe learned about working as a team, living in challenging conditions, and how to construct an experiment,\u201d Dyer explained. \u201cIn the end, though, I left the wildlife scene and returned to soils. I didn\u2019t like the biting and urination and bleeding that goes along with mammal research.\u201d<\/p>\n


\n\tWith graduation fast approaching, Dyer is finishing up her senior honors project examining how pathogens in water can accumulate in sub-aqueous soils and on eelgrass that lives on the soil.<\/p>\n


\n\tAs she considers options for her future \u2013 graduate school or a job \u2013 and looks back at her college career, Dyer said that it was the relationships she developed with faculty and students that will be the most memorable part of her education.<\/p>\n


\n\t\u201cThe professors in my department are amazing,\u201d she said with enthusiasm. \u201cThey\u2019re so approachable, and I have a personal relationship with all of them. The whole program has a really good learning community, which got the students really close and made for a fun learning experience. It couldn\u2019t have been better.\u201d<\/p>\n

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KINGSTON, R.I. \u2013 May 11, 2009 \u2013 Jessie Dyer arrived at the 溏心vlog免费B站 as a freshman with an intense interest in a subject that few students ever learn much about \u2013 soil. It\u2019s a topic that led her to an internship in Hawaii, a research project in Costa Rica, and a gathering […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":64702,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-64700","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-archives"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64700","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64700"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64700\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/64702"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64700"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64700"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64700"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}