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Stories from the field: By Edwin Jurado, Bachelor in Forest Engineering and Environment

Dreaming is not bad

By: Edwin Jurado Rojas, Bachelor in Forest Engineering and Environment of the National Amazonic University of Madre de Dios, Peru

I must start by thanking the Organization for Tropical Studies – OTS, for the opportunity provided. This course has been transformative for me, I expected to learn a lot and I did. Over the course of the days and weeks of the course, I became aware of how small my vision of ecology was and the infinite amount of work that needs to be done. The challenge that awaits us is incred-inline-blockle and uncertain at the same time, despite this, I maintain  hope that each of us who make up this wonderful team, will contribute to change in our society.

My teachers have influenced me in a thousand ways particularly in what I now want to be, my aptitude as a person and as a professional have been greatly enhanced. For these reasons, I feel happy, motivated and fortunate to have known them and shared many moments. However, all this would not have been possible without the company of my friends, special people whom I had the privilege of knowing.

I studied forestry and never imagined identifying spiders just by  architecture of their web, and the amazing thing was that we used “Latin science”, thanks to professor William Eberhard. Also, I did not imagine chasing monkeys for a whole day, and discovering a little more about their behavior, thanks for teaching us part of your work Sarie van Belle. Above all, I did not expect to meet Winnie Hallwachs and Dan Janzen, admirable people for their dedication to research and conservation of the forests, someday I hope to be like them “dreaming is not bad.”

I had never done a podcast much less a video about science, and I really came to appreciate its importance and the need of this tool for us as researchers, I promise to apply it from now on.

Formulating a research proposal was simply frustrating, I discovered how much I still need to learn from the “theoretical framework” and everything else in reality, but, this exercise has been the best I have had, as our professors said; everything is in practice.

I must end by  thanking Guis, Sofia, Jenny, Fernando and Pablo. Thanks for everything, they are the best!

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