I am in my last month here at the refuge so it’s time to start wrapping everything up. There are a few projects I have left to complete before ending my term. There are three main projects I am focusing on among other regular duties I have here at the refuge. The biggest projects I am working on is a questions and answers brochure for the visitor center, a display for the display case in the visitor center, and my end of term presentation.

One of the projects I wanted to create was a questions and answers brochure that visitors could pick up at the front. There are a lot of visitors who come to just enjoy the outside trails who don’t stop in the visitor center or those who come in mostly to enjoy the activities inside. Those who do stop and ask questions they are all relatively the same questions or same topic. Just by looking at the refuge you can’t see every bit of the hard work and planning that is going on behind the scenes. Since we are a relatively new refuge, we get a lot of restoration questions as well. I wanted to create a brochure that visitors could read if they didn’t have the time to ask questions or didn’t want to ask those tricky questions. In the brochure I combined all of the most common questions we get asked and gave some detail to inform visitors what is going on since a lot of our refuge is under construction or currently in the restoration process.

In the visitor center we have a display case that has the ability to be changed every so often. I was in charge of working on an idea for the first display we had, and I created a display that focused on the past of the refuge to show the history of the land. This refuge was a diary farm and so I placed old milk jugs and old photos we had found of what this land looked like in the past. Like I stated earlier this is a relatively new refuge and an old dairy farm therefore I wanted to create a display that went hand in hand with the brochure. It focuses more on our common questions about this land such as what did this land used to be? What restoration is occurring? So, I wanted to create a past, present, and future timeline that keeps the diary piece in the display but shows what has happened on the refuge up to the present time and what visitors can expect to see in the future.

My last big project is my end of term presentation. This is where I share with others a presentation of basically a summary of my time at the refuge including all the opportunities I have gotten to have, tasks I have worked on, future plans and anything else I want to include. This can be done in front of the rest of the staff at the refuge, or you can invite other people to join. I am pretty nervous about it because I have invited others to join who I am working towards future opportunities with. I have been working on my public speaking over this past year, so I've got this!