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Final Nonfiction Project - Popular Science Article

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Crash Course in Ecology It might sound weird, but your school is an ecosystem. No, really, not just in a metaphorical way: your school is a scientific ecosystem. Sound strange? Well, maybe it is. But let me explain what an ecosystem is first. According to Merriam-Webster , an ecosystem is a biological community of organisms and their interactions with their environment (“Ecosystem”). If you apply that definition to a school, it’s easier to see the student body as a community of organisms interacting within the school’s environment. I’m particularly interested in college ecosystems at the moment, because as a junior, I know that I’ll be applying to colleges this coming summer and fall. I’ve been thinking a lot about what type of college environment I want, and I’ve realized that a big part of that decision revolves around my intended major. I’ve narrowed down my possible career interests to something in biology, environmental science, or ecology, but I immediately realized that I knew...
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First Home Run

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       If I could relive any moment for the first time all over again, it would be hitting my first ever home run. After having played softball since I was nine years old, I finally hit my first out-of-the-park homer about six weeks ago in Olney, Illinois. When I first started playing softball, fielding and pitching came somewhat naturally to me, but I would strike out nearly every time I was up to bat. In seventh grade I started taking hitting lessons along with my weekly pitching lessons, and I worked earnestly on my hitting skills, but my progress felt really slow and I mostly resorted to bunting during middle school. Then, when I transferred to Uni from UMS and gave up having a school team to play with, I joined a travel softball team for the first time and started to gradually improve my hitting. The last few years I’ve become more of a contact hitter, hitting singles to get on base and advance runners, but I was still nowhere near being able to hit a ball out o...
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Favorite Place in CU

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     Last year, I discovered that the Parkland campus and surrounding area is a great place to run and explore with friends. During the full force of the pandemic, nearly everything I enjoyed doing had been shut down or reduced to some type of remote Zoom activity. Cross Country, however, remained one consistently fun activity for me and my teammates. Being an outdoor and easy-to-socially-distance sport, cross country thrived with a somewhat normal training schedule. Since we’d enjoyed practices, after the official season ended, Edie, Jeana, and I still met regularly to run on our own. I’d never run at Parkland before since it’s about a twenty minute drive from my house, and anytime I run on my own I always start from my doorstep and then jog somewhere in my neighborhood. But after a while of meeting to run at Parkland, always in the same place, we got bored with sticking to a strict training schedule and decided to meet for runs and then explore the campus and surroundin...
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Peanut and Polly

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                  Last April, my family purchased a mother-daughter pair of skinny pigs from a guinea pig shelter in Indianapolis. I’d heard of many people buying pets during the pandemic, and after months of slipping frequent reminders into conversations with my parents, they finally relented. I’d had both guinea and skinny pigs before, but they were always family pets, and I had never had a pet that was specifically mine, so I was even more excited this time around. Skinny pigs are basically furless guinea pigs except for a small patch of fur on their noses, and since they don’t have much fur, they’re hypoallergenic, so my dad and brothers can be around them. The word “skinny” is a play on words to describe their absence of fur, and definitely doesn’t describe their plump bodies. On Guinea Pig Finder, the website where my mom found them, they were listed as Abby and Harriet, which are (in my opinion) terrible names for such...
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Patches

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     Over the years, I’ve had many favorite childhood toys, but the ones that mean the most to me today are the ones that helped me through major life challenges. The single most important childhood possession to me was my stuffed dog Patches. Patches is a scruffy, and very floppy dog that my parents bought for me when I was 4 to help boost my confidence. My preschool teacher, Miss Brenda, noticed I couldn’t focus my right eye on the story books she would read aloud to my class (in other words, my right eye would wander). When she communicated this to my parents, they took me to see an optometrist. When I went to the eye doctor for the first time, I couldn’t even read the big “E” on the chart, making me legally blind. My parents also discovered that I had amblyopia, which is sometimes called “lazy eye.” I picked out my first pair of thin green glasses--and with it, an eyepatch. I know what you’re thinking, but I didn’t have to wear a pirate style skull-and-crossbones patc...
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Christmas Tradition

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  Christmas Tradition Every year for Christmas, my immediate family rotates which extended family we visit. To visit my dad’s side of the family, we travel to Antwerp, Ohio, a tiny town with a population under 1,500 (so small Google lists it as a village). Over the past 50+ years, two of those 1,500 inhabitants have been my grandparents. My dad was born and raised in Ohio, and his parents, my Grandpa and Busha (Polish for “Grandma”), lived there the entire time I was growing up. Whenever my parents, my sister, my three brothers and I crammed into our minivan for the four-hour car trip, we were always glad to tumble out into my grandparents’ frosty driveway a few days before Christmas. The night before the big day arrived, after an enormous dinner with specialites piled high from all sides of the family, along with stolen bits of sugar cookie dough, my cousins and I would clamor into the living room and situate ourselves around the Christmas tree with presents piled neatly underneat...
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