Today consisted of many types of conversations. We talked about what some challenges of the programs were, what we brought to the table, and got to meet with UM faculty and research students. It was refreshing to reflect on this past summer and give helpful feedback to Diana and Tony. To finish off the day, most of team Z went to Mall of America for shopping. Others had the opportunity to go to the race track instead.
-Ricardo Munoz
Hey everyone!
Today marked the first day of creating posters. We split up into our lake groups and began to tediously put together our graphs, images, and descriptions. Although this process had the potential to be incredibly difficult, we were able to recycle many of the slides we had made for the Voigt Task Force Conference this past Thursday. My partner is sort of obsessive about every detail being symmetrical so the process is moving forward slower than I had anticipated, but I know this extra care to attention will give us a beautiful polished final product. Furthermore, we were all glad to see Amy Mybro, who stopped by to help out with our posters. It has been a while since we last saw her and are excited to continue working with her.
-Ricardo Munoz
Today we worked all day on presentations for the Voigt Task Force tomorrow. We have really come a long way since our practice presentations yesterday. Can’t wait to see what happens!
Hello from team Zaaga’igan,
Today we continued working on our power point presentations for the conference we are attending on Thursday. We initially had the input of about four different mentors and staff members leading up to our practice presentation that was given in the afternoon. We presented to the faculty of Fond du Lac Resource Management which was beneficial because we were able to practice our presentations and receive constructive criticism. Lots of changes need to happen, but I am sure we left slightly more confident about our presentations.
Hello from team Zaaga’igan,
Today we continued working on our power point presentations for the conference we are attending on Thursday. We initially had the input of about four different mentors and staff members leading up to our practice presentation that was given in the afternoon. We presented to the faculty of Fond du Lac Resource Management which was beneficial because we were able to practice our presentations and receive constructive criticism. Lots of changes need to happen, but I am sure we left slightly more confident about our presentations.
Today team Zaaga’igan made lots of progress! We worked on data, bibliographies, and our papers today. Some of us have at least twelve graphs. To finish off a hard day of work,we went to Gordies for dinner and the warming house for desert. Overall it was an extremely productive day.
Picture: Chad helping Jordan with her graph as she makes a silly angry face at graphing.
Until next week,
-Ricardo Munoz
-Ricky Munoz
Lab Day 3: This week has been mostly lab work so far and we are gathering lots of data bit by bit. Today was an exciting day for Ma’Ko Qua and Ida because Jamie brought up the samples from LacCore to make their slides over Big Sandy Lake. We also got to practice speaking about our projects (not quite as short as the elevator speeches we practiced) to a reporter from GLIFWIC for this summer’s edition of Mazina’igan.
Today we began the phytolith extraction process on our smear samples from Perch and Sandy Lakes. We started off by burning the organic material in acid. This was cool because you could see the burnt orange gases (smog) being released as the process progressed.
Today we spent the day in the lab and started off by familiarizing ourselves with the phytolith reference slides then progressing to make our own slides for Mud and Perch lake. There is definitely an art to making these slides! In this picture Ma’Ko Qua is mixing the lake samples with the micro-spheres we added in the centrifuge. We had lots of fun throughout the slide making process and found using the centrifuge to be the most fun. It was definitely more challenging to look at phytoliths in the lake samples compared to the reference slides we had been looking at previously because the lake slides contained other phytolith types besides wild rice phytoliths. 
REU on Sustainable Land and Water Resources 