Networking

Tuesday: May 1, 2012

Over the course of the school year, my cohort and I have met some professionals and was invited by my department members to have dinner with them. I believe the first person we went out to lunch with was forensic anthropologist Cheryl Johnston, from Western Carolina University. It was a while ago, so I do not remember many of the details, but we did talk about the ethics behind teaching with human skeletons, especially when students are not the most mature. Mexican chicken quesadillas, yum.

Jeremy Wilson from IUPUI was invited to give a presentation on Transition Analysis to my Human Osteology class, and later we had dinner with him. There was a lot of us that time, so I found myself too far away to be a part of the conversations. We were at a Thai restaurant, and it was delicious. I had fried bananas for the first time, and have since made them myself!

Food wasn’t involved, but we met with Ted Parks from the Indiana School of Dentistry. One of our cases is quite confounding, so we went to him to get x-rays to see if it would aid our research in understanding the problem. The technology he used totally wowed me – I was expecting the standard radiographs like the kind I get at the dentist; instead, they used something akin to a CT scan – it gave us a 3D x-ray rendition of our specimen that we can look at in slices. Pretty awesome.

This semester, I have had both lunch and dinner with Richard Jefferies of University of Kentucky. I will see him a lot more this summer, as I intend to volunteer at a site on Sapelo Island. The first time, we simply ate lunch at school and I sat by his wife chatting about about France and how awesome Sapelo Island is. The second time, we had a lot more students involved so again I found myself too far away for chatting. Instead, I enjoyed my cheesy ravioli thoroughly. The Sapelo Island gig, by the way, is a two week stint off the coast of Georgia. Dr. Jefferies has been conducting work there with one of my teachers for years. Some undergrads have already gone on a field school there and have reported that Sapelo Island is an adventure. There is only something like 80 people who live on the island, sandy beaches, and ocean breezes. I am pretty excited to go.

The last person I’ve been introduced to was Steve Inskeep of NPR fame. The Anthropology department hosted him for most of a day, allowing the students to meet and greet, then the faculty members, and then he had a public presentation. His book, Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi, was sold at the event and I picked one up for my mother-in-law. I was around him all day myself, because I was asked to take photos (not that I am great at it, but I happened to have had a camera with me). I practiced some networking skills, joining groups talking to him, and excusing myself, and maybe I learned something from that, but I still hate doing it. Later, we went to dinner with him, mostly faculty, and I had delicious homemade potato chips, all the while wondering if the building would be torn down by a tornado.

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campus • networking • Sapelo-Island