Hello, my name is Jayli Husband and I live in Okemos, Michigan. I am a freshman at MSU this year and am pursuing an Environmental Geoscience major with an Environmental Studies and Sustainability minor. My future involves becoming an environmental scientist that educates and helps businesses or people to become more environmentally aware or to become a scientist that actively works to protect the environment. Personally, I have two siblings, a cat, and a love for nature. I love to hang out with my friends, go on adventures, and watch movies.
Although my major centers around science, I also love history and writing. In fact, in high school, history classes were my favorite and writing essays were way more fun to me than solving math equations. However, I ended up going in the environmental route because I strongly believe that I can make a difference through science, even if that change is small. Going back to history, I have always enjoyed learning about world history because it includes different cultures and multiple perspectives. Specifically, I love learning about times in history that have dramatically changed countries and ways of life, such as the Haitian and French Revolution or the Age of Enlightenment. Because slavery is such a huge and terrible part of history, I believe that we can never learn too much about it and people actually need to learn more about it to understand how it continues to negatively affect black people all around the world.
Because of my interest in science and history I am looking forward to week six where we will discuss geospatial analysis and mapping. I believe that showing geographical maps of slavery and where slaves travelled once they were emancipated will help people realize how slavery affected people living in certain areas and how slavery is connected to poverty in these areas. Additionally, I think that taking a Digital History class during this pandemic will show me the other benefits of technology. For instance, during my time in online school, I have dreaded to log onto my computer each morning because staring at a screen gets repetitive, but taking this class will show me additional uses for technology that I had not been aware of prior to this class.
Welcome, Jayli! Thank you for such a thoughtful and reflective blog post. I think it is really great that you are studying environmental sciences– something that we really need right now! I’m also happy to hear that you are very interested in history. There is actually a sub-branch of history called environmental history, which you might also be interested in! One of my favorite books is called “Sustaining Lake Superior” by Nancy Langston: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300212983/sustaining-lake-superior . You should definitely check it out!
The week on mapping will be a lot of fun– mostly because we will be working with different types on information and learning how they can be presented in relation to geography. There are a few different ways of doing this, but I won’t spoil anything now!
I look forward to hearing more of your thoughts and experiences throughout the semester!