Ethan Kilroy International Scholars Program ePortfolio
Observation
Whether it be swimmers in a pool that I am lifeguarding or birds flying in the air that I need to identify, observational skills have greatly helped me throughout my professional and academic career. In my time lifeguarding, I have become skilled at effectively scanning an area to look for out-of-place details and ensure that I am observing every part of a given area. Proper observation could mean the difference between life and death in some cases, and I am proud that I was able to quickly identify and respond to emergencies when they happened. In my Wildlife Behavior class, I have learned how to relax my vision and use “soft eyes” as well as my hearing to observe an area before focusing on an animal in that area. My time in Kenya and Madagascar as well as the Field Ecology class I took at UF have given me practice in identifying the wildlife that I observe.
Flexibility
Flexibility is a skill that I believe is critical in all aspects of life and one that has served me well while traveling, teaching, working, and learning. In both my role teaching swimming and water safety to adults and my role teaching environmental and science education to kids, being able to adapt a prepared lesson plan has been crucial to ensuring that I am an effective instructor. While it is important to be prepared, a good instructor must also be able to adjust their lessons to suit their participants/students, which sometimes requires making multiple adjustments so that everyone is receiving the instruction they will find most beneficial. Flexibility also has made my travels manageable and more enjoyable. My suitcase may have gotten left behind at the Atlanta airport when I traveled to Madagascar, but was I going to let that dampen my mood? Absolutely not! I simply washed my T-shirt in the sink and 3 days later my suitcase and I were reunited. Plus I luckily had a change of underwear and deodorant in my backpack which I’m sure my bunkmates appreciated.
Communication
Without effective communication, I would not have been able to accomplish nearly as much as I have so far. In my roles in educating children, it has been important to be able to explain scientific concepts in ways that are both engaging and understandable for the grade level that I am working with. It is also crucial to promote two-way communication and encourage the students to explore the concepts themselves and ask questions about the material. In my lifeguarding roles, especially those where I was in a supervisor position, communication was critical both on and off the pool deck. Communicating with patrons is of the utmost importance if one is to provide excellent services, and communication with fellow lifeguards and higher management is essential to ensure that the pools are operating smoothly and safely. In my role as a swim instructor, communication made the difference between participants becoming proficient in a new skill or being stuck at their current level. By explaining and demonstrating new skills as well as talking with participants to get their feedback on how they felt trying the new skill out, we were able to work together to find ways to make them more comfortable and confident in their swimming abilities.
Critical Thinking
I am fortunate enough to have been able to learn in many different places from a multitude of sources. However, it is not enough to simply take in information from these sources at face value. Critical thinking has allowed me to make connections between the things that I have learned from different sources during my academic career. For example, in Madagascar’s spiny forest, I observed different adaptations that the plants used to tolerate the arid environment. Many of these adaptations were comparable to adaptations that I saw in the savannah in Kenya. While both of these groups of flora show adaptations to retain water, some of the adaptations I saw in the plants in Madagascar resembled the adaptations that plants in Kenya use to defend themselves against large herbivores. While there are currently no large herbivores in this region of Madagascar, in classes I had previously taken at UF about Madagascar, I learned about the extinction of many large herbivore species. From this, I inferred that some of the adaptations I saw in the flora of the spiny thicket likely developed during the presence of these now-extinct megafauna species. Critical thinking has allowed me to better utilize my past experiences to better understand the natural world.