October has been a busy month! As part of working with the honors college, I have been meeting with a handful of undergrads that need public service hours. We have been working on developing multiple educational booth activities to do at the Boys and Girls club here in Columbus. Last week we had our first visit to the Boys and Girls club to see how our activities work. It went really well! We have two more visits coming up later this month so we have time to refine and update our booth activities a couple times

I also had a great time this week as a costume contest judge as part of the MUW Oktoberfest fall festival. Lastly, I’m very excited to share that Bailey was awarded a Mississippi Space Grant award for a spring 2020 research internship! She’ll be working on a research project this spring looking at lizard limb length variation along with her honors project on Puerto Rican anole toe pads.

Bailey Howell, Arpana Upadhyay, Anush Aryal, and Cayla Skinner (L to R) practicing our activities before taking them to the Boys and Girls club

Anush asking the kids to find different kinds of animals (mammals, carnivores, fish, etc)

It looks chaotic, but Bailey did a great job running the handmade bouncy ball booth