Month: May 2025

Sweet Beginnings: Pineapples, Family, and Sustainability Hola! To kick off week two in Costa Rica, we began with a local organic pineapple tour. It was laid out like a hayride, with a tractor pulling our group throughout the farm. I learned that the farm, like other organic farms, omits pesticide use by planting pineapples through… Read more »

If you’ve been keeping up with my last blog, you know that I’ve had something like the opposite of an existential crisis: the likes of gratitude and the kind of new perspective that you get when you try a tropical fruit that you’ve never tasted before. Pure joy, for all that lives and exists around… Read more »

Wow, what a week it’s been! It’s hard to believe we are already onto our second blog of just three for this class. This unit we are finishing, Social-Ecological Systems, has been eye opening to me in a multitude of ways, as I have seen the processes Costa Rica has utilized to bring together tourism,… Read more »

I have always been interested in maps. Dots are on a piece of paper with lines between them that connect each other and make the world what we know it as. I am the nerd who opens Apple Maps to look at highway routes and what cities go through. In grade school, I spent rainy… Read more »

I would describe my time here in Costa Rica as a mosaic of sensory experiences. Early on, I realized that I have primarily relied on my sense of sight so far on this trip, as well as when I’m back home. I cannot completely blame myself for this – people are very visual creatures, and… Read more »

Believe it or not, there’s likely more to being human than reaching consciousness. While living an easy, conscious life might be appealing, humans are inherently driven to be ambitious, connected, and engaged in their communities. That drive often gives our lives deeper purpose and fulfillment. Just to keep you updated – in my last blog… Read more »

Sustainability in practice: Living in Costa Rica has shown me how other cultures focus on sustainability and protecting the environment. Visiting the pineapple farm and banana farm has shown me how farming can be done in a less destructive way, compared to the United States. The Pineapple farm was HUGE, they were a monocrop farm… Read more »

It feels like everything is going so fast now. I look back at the last days and everything just somewhat blurs together. It reminds me of one of the last days my team was collecting data at La Selva. It had been raining so I took off my glasses to clean them. The sun was… Read more »

To begin our unit on diet sustainability, we visited pineapple farm, which might have been my favorite excursion of the trip. I have never been a big fan of pineapple… or any tropical fruit, really. Hence, I was not expecting to enjoy eating and numbing my tongue (they have protein-eating enzymes) from an entire pineapple… Read more »

At this point in the trip, I smell unmistakably like a peccary and resemble a rain-soaked three-toed sloth (the grayer and more dirtier looking ones). We’re two thirds of the way through our Costa Rican adventure, and I’m honestly not sure how that happened. Time moves differently out here. One moment you’re stepping off the… Read more »

“The most important truths aren’t always measurable. They’re felt—in the air, in the shared work, in the quiet recognition that everything is part of something else.” When we talk about ecosystems, we often describe them in diagrams—boxes and arrows, inputs and outputs, predators and prey. But living inside one, as we’ve done these past two… Read more »

My last blog entry was centered around reconnecting with my inner child. With my time at La Selva I was able to foster my passion and wonder for wildlife. Now entering unit two of our course, food systems, my wonder has expanded to reach new places outside of just La Selva. This began with our… Read more »

Now that I have had a little space from that first week, I can say this trip has shifted my entire internal thought process. It started out as a kind of survival mission. I was drenched in sweat, covered in bug bites, and dragging myself through the rainforest, but somewhere between getting totally muddy during… Read more »

It has been two weeks since we arrived in Costa Rica, and this past week has been extremely eventful and filled with eye-opening experiences. In between finishing up our data collection, we visited two farms near La Selva— an organic pineapple farm and a small-scale, sustainable banana farm. Leaving the rainforest and seeing people other… Read more »

Day one quickly turned into day eleven in my journal, and it all happened within the blink of an eye. I quickly fell into a routine in La Selva, almost as if I had been there for months, so when it was finally time to adventure 30 minutes away from La Selva, I found that… Read more »

This past week, I learned that the career of a field biologist is so much more than just being in the rainforest and looking at plants and animals all day. One of the best parts about being a field biologist is getting the ability to travel and see sights that you might have never been… Read more »

Before I came to Costa Rica, or even applied for the program, I had an image of what a rainforest was. I’ve watched countless documentaries about different plants, animals, and people who live in this environment (shout out to BBC’s Planet Earth and Human Planet). But boy, was I wrong. Okay, not totally incorrect. I… Read more »

Humans have the privilege of being alive and conscious. I’d argue it’s unfortunate that we’ve used that consciousness to come up with things like taxes and racism, but that is not the center of my IU blog. The point is that we notice things. We’re wired for observation. But what we actually see, and what… Read more »

Saying Goodbye and Shifting Mindsets After clenching my mom and dad, bidding them my final farewells, and walking through the airport doors, I found myself overcome with mixed feelings of sadness and excitement. A few days prior to my departure, my older brother graduated college. This brought my whole family together, which is something that… Read more »

Ever since I was a kid I have loved the idea of traveling the world. From watching the TV show Expedition Unknown with my parents to learning how to name every country in the world in fifteen minutes on the website sporcle.com, my fascination with nature and the people who call Earth home has always… Read more »

My trip to Costa did not start as I envisioned. Most of my friends were sleeping in, enjoying the first few days of summer break. I woke up at 4 AM in my cousin’s Chicago apartment to catch an Uber for a 7 AM flight to Costa Rica. After an unexpectedly long TSA for a… Read more »

The first time I flew alone was domestically two summers ago. Since then, I’ve flown alone four more times, twice domestically and twice internationally. Although each trip took me to a different place, I had the same shared feelings of adulthood, solitude, and certainty while embarking on these adventures. Despite that pattern, as I made… Read more »

Arriving in Costa Rica, I could tell that life was surrounding us. We took a large bus from the airport to La Selva Biological Center. It was an almost three hour drive, which took us first through the busy city. Cars were passing us on both sides, and motorbikes cutting through the lanes. It seemed… Read more »

Ever since I was a little kid, I have always had a fascination with animals of all kinds. I also want to become a field biologist after college, so I love learning about the ecosystem, sustainability, and random facts about species new and old. When I heard about an opportunity to go to Costa Rica… Read more »

As a girl who finds herself in the airport more often than not, I find it really easy to find the beauty in the pool of nerves that eats at you when traveling to a new country. Yet for some reason I was sitting in the plane not fully comprehending what was going on. I… Read more »

As a math education major who has not taken a science class since AP Physics in high school, I had no business being on this trip. I applied last minute because it was a Spanish speaking country (I have a Spanish minor), and I love an opportunity to try something new. In my application essay,… Read more »