Mary C. Henry

The semester has just ended and I have received emails from several students inquiring about their grades.  Most of these emails have asked me to reconsider the grades that I reported to the university registrar and are now released to students.  These emails have become increasingly more common and also more brazen in their requests/demands.  I would like students to think long and hard before sending these end-of-semester emails and consider a few questions: Did you attend this class? If you answer "yes", but you missed more than 10% of class meetings (in my classes this would amount to missing more than three out of our 27 class meetings), how many classes did you miss?  Did you miss them for a family emergency? Due to illness? Or because you overslept or had more important things to do? Most of us have policies that allow flexibility for illness and family emergencies.  It is also good to learn what university offices can assist you with these matters. At...

Luna Lovegood joined our family on Star Wars Day! My sabbatical (or Assigned Research Leave as Miami likes to call them) officially ended when the semester did (graduation was Mother's Day weekend), but faculty are on 9-month appointments and I am not teaching this summer. So I have the summer off, right? Well, things have quieted down considerably since most of the grad students are out doing field work and have finished up with qualifying & comprehensive exams for the year. I was also asked to fill in on a PhD oral exam since a committee member is leaving the country* (need to go read the written exam ASAP!), but otherwise I don't have any formal grad student work going on right now, either. Since we're not doing a family trip to Kenya this year (too expensive!) I did volunteer to mentor a student in Miami's Ecology Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program. I also have a grad student doing local field work this year. My plan is to have my REU ...

We had a cluster meeting today and spent the entire hour letting the students update us on their research progress. The projects include lake water sampling, monitoring ant populations, relating plant cover to remotely sensed data, and modeling BTU output for potential biofuel applications**. Each student talked about what they had been doing so far and what kind of data collection and analysis they would be doing. Some common themes ran through each discussion, such as steep learning curves and struggling with defining and explaining research. In this program, we mentor students, but expect them to take ownership of their projects and ask them to explain their planned work early on. It's always a struggle for me to keep quiet when my student is talking about the work at this stage. I always worry that I am not providing enough guidance (or too much guidance without being clear about the big picture). It can be challenging for the students early on, but I thought they all did a goo...

Global EVI Summer 2000. Image credit: NASA MODIS Gallery We are technically about to start week 4 of the summer around here (!), but I feel like I am still trying to get in gear. The REU students have arrived and I think we have another excellent group. We assign our student-mentor teams into research clusters. Sometimes these clusters work collaboratively and other times we are grouped by a common interest. I am part of the “Landscape and Ecosystem Ecology” cluster with four other faculty and three other students (in addition to mine). We meet in our clusters about once a week during the summer and discuss research articles and what progress we are making on our projects. My student will be working on part of my USDA grant to map Amur honeysuckle. She will do some field work, but will spend a lot of her time learning about and using remote sensing and image processing. For students who do not have a strong background in remote sensing, I usually start...

Miami University has a summer research program for undergraduates in Ecology, funded by the National Science Foundation’s Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Program. Our REU Program was recently renewed for a third three-year term (2009-2011) and this year’s students will be arriving next week. Each student is paired with a faculty mentor from a range of departments like Botany, Zoology, and Geography. I will be working with a student this summer- the fourth student I have advised for REU. I am also now on the steering committee for our REU program, so I was involved in writing the proposal for the renewal, selecting student applicants, and helping with other planning. I am always impressed with the students that participate in our program. My three former students are all in graduate school now (the student from last summer will be starting this fall) and I have even been able to publish with one of them (a...