I am a Westcoast girl at heart and a lover of this beautiful coast that I am so fortunate to reside on! On that note, I would like to acknowledge with respect that I will be blogging and experiencing my education at UVIC from the traditional territories of the Lkwungen, Songhees, Esquimalt and W̱SÁNEĆ people whose historical relationships with the land continue to this day.

I grew up on the Westcoast of Canada where to this day I play in the mountains and along our coastline. As the daughter of two fisheries biologists who prioritized family camping trips over other vacations, I had the opportunity to have many meaningful moments along salmon spawning streams, collecting kelp along the beach, exploring tide pools and hiking among alpine meadow flowers. Outside the gratitude for rubber boots and rain gear, as these were rain or shine adventures, I developed a deep gratitude for our natural world, the ecosystem we inhabit and an appreciation for science based explanations to my many questions and observations. As I moved into my undergrad in biology and earth and ocean sciences I fell in love with my ecology and oceanography classes and those classes that applied science into topics such as conservation biology, resource management and climate science. In a day where information behind issues like Climate Change are cloudier then they should be for many individuals in society I feel fortunate to have received the access to an education that allowed me to comprehend the severity and need for action on such an issue. And yet, it is also frustrating that not everyone had this opportunity to learn science in a way that allowed them to apply it to real world issues. I hope that as I enter the teaching profession as a science teacher I can inspire and empower students to ask tough questions, think critically about what they are hearing and to use their science education confidently in both it’s purest forms and applied manners as they move through their daily life. Not every student wants to grow up and be a scientist, that is okay, but I hope that every student will be able to take the most valuable lessons of a science education and apply it  into whatever they do next!