 There's two big outdoor education programs in the country and really in the world, and one is called the National Outdoor Leadership School and the other is called Outward Bound. And they both have their own flavor of experiential learning. And I was a student on a Knowles course right after I graduated college. And that really inspired me to want to be an outdoor educator and to work in that type of field where you get to provide these intensive educational experiences for people. There's about them going out into a new environment in this really intense experience with a group of people and learning about themselves, their character building experiences, but they're also experiences to learn skills from environmental stewardship to first aid to navigation. So there's all these different pieces and so you're really like inundated with a lot of information, but because it's such a transformational space like people learn so much stuff both about themselves and all these new skills. And that's what I wanted to do when I graduated college and it really made a big impression on me. So when I got back, I decided that that's what I wanted to do. So I started working for the other program, the other major program called Outward Bound, which really I thought was a good fit for me because they have a really strong educational philosophy and a lot of emphasis on the group process. And so I learned a lot of really good skills about being an educator, about leading groups, about helping people learn, about helping different kinds of learners with different kinds of needs really accomplish their goals. So that was really important I think for my education as an educator. After I finished my PhD and I moved out to Washington, I became familiar with a program that ran out of the University of Washington's Marine Labs called BeamRach. So BeamRach provides this hands-on opportunity for students to both learn to propose a research project, which is very academic, but also to go into the field together as a group and live on a sailboat for a month while they're actually conducting their research projects. So that's the experiential education piece of that. And so those things really are melded in the BeamRach program. So when I had the opportunity to instruct it, I really got to develop these ideas of putting academic science education together with the outdoor education. So when I started at Western this year and I was given the teaching assignment of teaching biometrics, which is biostatistics, I immediately thought of my BeamRach students who were begging to learn statistics after they had gathered all of this data for their own projects. And often, statistics is not a discipline that undergraduate students are very excited about learning, and really people in general, because it's something that is exciting once you need to apply it in a real situation, once you need to apply it to your own data when the outcome of the analysis really matters, when you're really invested in it. And so these students in this independent project, doing their independent projects, were just begging to learn more statistics. And they were absorbing the concepts really, really quickly, and applying them really successfully. So when I was given the teaching assignment for biometrics, I thought, well, how can I provide that same type of experience that I was able to provide for a small number of students in an intensive field course to 40 students working in a computer lab, you know, in the classroom. So that's one of the ways I thought hard about how to bring those experiences to the biometrics class. And I came up with the idea of doing the service learning project.