Furman Engaged

Furman Engaged was interesting, I suppose. I'd say it was pretty much what I was expecting, but then I really wasn't expecting much of anything. People had been mentioning it for a while, and most teachers included it in the syllabus-schedule. Still, I don't think anyone ever bothered to explain in depth what it was, so I actually had no clue leading into it. All I knew was that there was no class, and who could object to that?

I'd heard from a few friends that they were going to be giving presentations, and I also came across a couple that I hadn't expected to see—including my good friend Jocelyn, a sustainability/biology major, who was showing off her research on urban gardens. She explained to me the variety of reasons why urban gardens were important, and how she had looked at their distribution throughout the Greenville area using GoogleMaps data. Basically, with data from a few year span she sought to determine what factors led to the survival of an urban garden, in hopes that this information could then be used to plan future gardening initiatives. Apparently they were still analyzing their data or something, so they only had preliminary sort of findings to show. It was shown that gardens next to schools are significantly more likely to survive, and those next to churches even more so, suggesting the important of community engagement.

I also stopped by a couple other presenters. One girl who I listened to for awhile had been a part of a study that looked at prospective memory and the effect of multitasking on spontaneous retrieval. It's hard to recall exactly, but there was something about a deep semantic task and a shallow semantic task, and there was a processing theory and a threshold theory, and there was particular focus paid to the differences between younger and older adults. It was pretty interesting, and I was actually quite impressed with how official it all seemed; they had a surprisingly high sample size for the experiments, both of old and young participants.

Truth be told, the highlight of the day was probably going to the International Food Festival in Watkins. On top of getting to talk with some good friends (and briefly trying to make eye-contact across the room with Dr. Shane Herron), I got to eat lots of delicious food. Several of the cooking groups didn't have their food all out and ready right off the bat, so the appearance of dishes was actually a pretty gradual one—I had to keep going back as new things appeared. In the end I'm sure I tried everything, from the Korean to the Chinese to the Japanese to the Indian to the Mexican to the Russian, and probably ate more of it than anyone else. Not that I didn't somewhat earn this though, by driving some FUISA members to Publix the day before to buy ingredients.