At Middlebury College, I'm pursuing a joint major in Environmental Studies and Geography, building a strong foundation in cartography, GIS, remote sensing, and natural science alongside a broader environmental studies curriculum. This fall, I'm participating in the Environmental Studies practicum, working directly with Vermont community members to research and map road salt contamination, a project that lets me apply my geospatial skills to a pressing, locally relevant environmental issue. Coursework like Remote Sensing & Land Use and GIS & Natural Environment has given me hands-on experience applying spatial analysis to real environmental problems, while classes in ecology, evolution, and natural science have deepened my understanding of the systems those maps ultimately represent.

Outside the classroom, Middlebury's setting, surrounded by the Green Mountains, Lake Champlain, and countless rivers and trails, has shaped how I spend my time as much as it's shaped my studies. Through the Middlebury Mountain Club, I've served as an Outdoor Programs Assistant and Backpacking Guide, leading trips into the Adirondack and Green Mountains and sharing my love of New York and Vermont's landscapes with other students. I've also been deeply involved with Sunday Night Environmental Group, serving as Internal Outreach Coordinator and working on their Forest Protection Committee to research and advocate for the protection of old-growth forests in the region. Alongside this, I've served as Secretary for MiddVolunteers and worked as a Feb Orientation Leader, rounding out a Middlebury experience built around community, the outdoors, and hands-on environmental work.

During my exchange semester at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, I studied geography while immersing myself in a completely new academic and cultural environment. My coursework culminated in a group research project studying the Dunedin Botanical Garden, where my team investigated the garden's relationship to student place attachment and perceptions of native versus invasive plant species, conducting interviews, distributing questionnaires, and mapping our findings together. Working through every stage of the research process as a team, from designing our methodology to synthesizing results, taught me how to navigate collaborative research and reconcile different perspectives within a shared project.

Outside the classroom, a group of friends and I pooled together to buy a car, and spent nearly every weekend chasing the country's wild places, backpacking Milford Sound, the Copland Track, Brewster Glacier, and Roys Peak (pictured!). It was on one of these trips, standing beneath the Brewster Glacier ice arch, that I witnessed firsthand how quickly a changing climate can reshape a landscape, an experience that would go on to shape the direction of my work. My time in New Zealand also introduced me to Māori culture through a Waiata class, where I learned traditional song and dance, gaining a deeper appreciation for the cultural history and relationship to land that runs through so many of the places I explored that semester.

During a gap semester with the High Mountain Institute's Fall Trek program, I spent months backpacking through Colorado, Utah, and Chilean Patagonia alongside a group of 10 fellow students, combining place-based academics with wilderness expedition skills. Living and traveling together across such varied, unpredictable terrain and weather built not just technical outdoor skills, but a deep sense of resilience and teamwork, learning to problem-solve, communicate, and rely on one another when conditions didn't go as planned. That teamwork extended beyond survival skills, too, as we planned and executed a self-directed, student-led expedition together, taking on shared responsibility for logistics and risk management from start to finish. This was also where I first learned to read and navigate with maps in a purely recreational sense, using topographic maps and a compass to route-find through the backcountry, long before I ever thought of mapmaking as a craft of my own.

This semester was also my first real introduction to environmental justice, learned directly from the land itself. At Highwater Farm, I studied Colorado water rights and was struck by the injustice at their core. Despite being the original inhabitants of the land, Indigenous communities are not granted the earliest, most senior water rights under the state's prior appropriation system. In Utah, backpacking through Bears Ears National Monument exposed me to ongoing conflicts over park boundaries and land use, as well as the tensions between conservation, tribal sovereignty, and resource extraction. And in Chilean Patagonia, I encountered a different but related story of land ownership, where vast tracts of wild land are held by a small number of private owners, raising questions about access, conservation, and who gets to decide a landscape's future. Together, these experiences shaped how I think about the human systems layered beneath every landscape I now map.