Girl Power!!

Today Alicia, Jennifer and I presented at an Expanding Your Horizons conference at the College of Coastal Georgia. Expanding Your Horizons encourages and motivates middle school aged girls to get involved in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math through hands on conferences like today which showcase these particular fields and provide female role models in these professions. We had two full sessions of girls participate in our Sea Turtle Rescue 911 class, in which they make a medical diagnosis through investigating a plush sea turtle patient that is based on real patients at the GSTC. These girls were quite impressive, thoroughly enjoyed our program, and made excellent sea turtle doctors!!

Susan Shipman, the first female Director of the Department of Natural Resources was the keynote speaker. Her account of growing up, loving to explore bugs on her way to school, and working all over the world (including Africa, Alaska, Washington, Hawaii to name a few) was very inspiring! Mrs. Shipman is also an UGA Alumna, photographer, scuba diver and honeybee keeper. Needless to say, this woman absolutely fascinated me!! Closing the conference were amazingly talented Jabali African Acrobats from Kenya. It was a great day!

I just love the logo for Expanding Your Horizons! I wish my hair was that cool :-]