Relationship with Aberdeen Geography Continues to Grow

Two years ago, our department embarked on a department to department relationship with the Geography and Environment Department at the University of Aberdeen.  In summer of 2014, I visited to Aberdeen to initiate this unique and mutually beneficial relationship.  

St Mary's Hall - Home of Geography at University of Aberdeen
In Spring 2015, Piotr Niewiadomski, a human geographer at Aberdeen, visited our campus to give a couple of lectures and get to know UW-Eau Claire and our department, faculty, students, and programs. We explored ways of growing the relationship, making student exchanges more accessible and, maximizing the mutual benefits to our students and programs.  As examples, Aberdeen is interested in having their students participate in our geospatial certificate program and we are interested in exploring the feasibility of taking a GEOG 368 to Scotland.  This year, we have two students from Aberdeen in Eau Claire and four of our geography students at Aberdeen -- a record number of exchanges between our departments!

 We are excited at how this program is growing and what it may mean for our programming and the learning opportunities for us and our students.  We are very happy to know that Aberdeen is equally excited in the possibilities.  See the article they just posted on their departmental website.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

UW-Eau Claire Geographer 2016 Regent Scholar

Image
Dr. Joe Hupy with teaching his field methods class The Department of Geography and Anthropology is excited to learn that our colleague Dr. Joe Hupy has just been selected as one of three 2016 UW System Regent Scholars .  The Scholarship is intended to encourage and reward cutting-edge undergraduate research and collaboration that has the potential to spur regional economic development and entrepreneurial possibilities.  The scholarship comes with summer funding to support research and scholarly activities while stimulating innovation and industry outreach.   Specifically, Dr. Hupy's research involves using Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) for economic and environmental applications in the mining, and has the potential for much wider geospatial applications in construction, insurance, real estate, and beyond.  For more details on Dr. Hupy and his work related to the grant, see the UW-Eau Claire news article .  To learn about how to geographically apply UAS, you may want to take
Read more

So, who was Henry Kolka, anyway?

Image
Some weeks back, the Department of Geography and Anthropology was happy to announce our student scholarship winners (see earlier blog post). After that, a few of us in the department started wondering about the scholarships and who they are named after. It seemed strange to honor current students with awards named after people of whom we knew little. Who was this Henry Kolka and how did we end up with a scholarship named after him? It seemed shameful not to know. Well, one thing led to another, and Bob Barth's daughter found an obituary of Henry Kolka. And that led to other things.  According to the obituary, Henry Kolka was a professor of geography at UW-Eau Claire from 1943 to his retirement in 1975. He passed away in 1991. No faculty currently in the department was here when Mr. Kolka was, so faculty have no stories of Mr. Kolka. But Yvonne, our secretary, does. She started in 1970 and remembers him as somebody who liked to bring her flowers. Let that be a lesson to me. Back
Read more

4 UWEC students at national geography conference in Florida

Image
This past week, the Association of American Geographers (AAG) held its Annual Meeting , this time in Tampa. The AAG has been hosting annual meetings every year since 1904.  I am not sure what the attendance was in Tampa, but last year in Los Angeles there were over 7,000 attendees.  That's a lot of geographers. Arik Arnevik & Jackson Becker in front of their poster at AAG 2014, Tampa, FL UW-Eau Claire has a long history of student and faculty participation at the AAG Annual Meetings, and we are suspect that we bring as many undergraduate participants as nearly any other school in the country.  This year, in addition to seven UW-Eau Claire faculty participants, we were proud to have four students successfully present their research.   Nate Wick explains details of his research to Ross Guida ('09), now in the PhD program at Southern Illinois University. Nathaniel Wick presented a poster of the research he conducted with recent UWEC geography graduate Sam Krueger
Read more