Hello everyone, My name is India and I am a Supplemental Instruction leader for Botany 105!

My major is Rangeland Resources Science (but I also have some background in Environmental Resources Engineering), and my minor is Native American Studies with a concentration in Law and Policy.

I worked at the Learning Center first as an embedded tutor for Introductory Biostatistics for one semester, and am now starting my third semester of leading Botany SI, which is quite a different experience for me compared to tutoring, but it is truly wonderful. Some reasons that I decided to work for the Learning Center are my desire to be helpful, my curiosity to learn more from as many different people and perspectives as possible, and getting experience to hopefully be an instructor or professor one day. The reason that I love being part of Supplemental Instruction in particular is because of the immense amount of support all around me while I am in this role; my coworkers have my back and so do the students in my class, and there is never a reason to feel bad for not knowing something because we can all figure it out together.

My first language is English, but I am quickly becoming more fluent in Spanish with the help of my friends who answer as many of my questions as they can, spell words out for me, and add their own sections to my Spanish notebook that I still have from my 2 years of Spanish in high school. I am fairly confident in my ability to engage in conversations in Spanish, as long as people are willing to be patient with me and maybe talk a little bit more slowly. I have learned and retained much more with the help of various friends in the past 1.5 years than I did in my 2 years of high school Spanish, and I think this really speaks to the concept of learning with a good community to support you like Supplemental Instruction aims to provide.

My hobbies include spending time with my dog Marcela, foraging with my partner for huckleberries/blackberries/bolete mushrooms and more, cooking, hiking, swimming, playing music with my guitar/banjolele/piano, reading, watching documentaries, making art of people and their pets, taking photos and often using them in my Botany SI PowerPoints, volunteering, and being a gate-person at music shows and events. I recently had perhaps the coolest experience of my life, participating in a 2-week field course through HSUs ESM department, learning and retaining an incredible amount of information about the Klamath Basin and restoration techniques, camping in ~8 different places, and interacting with the nicest professionals in various fields of ecological restoration. I made ~15 new lifelong friends and we all had really significant realizations about how we truly do belong in our fields and that there are actually a lot of other people who care as deeply as we do about the environment, animals, and Indigenous communities. I will most certainly be encouraging other students to get involved with similar courses!

 Intro Video link: https://flip.com/96715695