 It wasn't my primary goal to begin with, so I was just thinking, how can I get a bunch of real data in the hands of my students? So with 40 students and 10 weeks, it's not really possible for them to collect large data sets, enough for them to really do some big statistical analyses, and I also wanted them to work on real-world data sets, which are not always clean and nice. And so sometimes a way to teach the course is to provide them with an idealized data set that they can analyze and then write a report about, but that's not necessarily giving them the experience of struggling with missing data and things that don't quite make sense. You know, that's what you really are going to have in the real world, no matter what kind of data you're working on. And so it really seemed like this type of partnership with organizations that had real data was going to be the best way to get the kind of data I wanted the students to work with in their hands. And just as a byproduct of that, I started to think about how this happened to get them involved in the community, and because the groups that need this type of help tend to be non-profits, it had the added benefit of the students being able to provide a real service for different groups in the community. And to tie this back into the idea of experiential education and outward bound, one of the core values of outward bound, one of the pillars is service. And so not just learning self-reliance and quality of work and all that kind of stuff, but learning to give back to the community because that's a large piece of rounding out an experiential education. And so it just seemed like that fit in really well to bring the civic engagement part. And I think the students immediately appreciated that, and they rose to the occasion of analyzing this data because they knew that this community partner was relying on them. And I think that they were more willing and excited about putting in the time because they knew that this wouldn't happen otherwise, that they were actually helping a partner out. Providing a service that filled the need in the community. And we found, I tried to find a range of partners so that students would be able to work in a field that was of interest to them. So we worked with a couple of tribal groups. We had a group working with the Department of Public Works for Whatcom County, so that's a government agency. We had a group working with WESNIP, which is a program that provides spay and neuter services for low-income people in Whatcom County. So that was of great interest for students that are interested in animals or pre-vet. We had a group working with the Nooksack Salmon Enhancement Association, and they both do education and outreach as well as environmental remediation and environmental work to help salmon. So I tried to get a range of projects so that students could plug into something that meant something to them. It's relatively rare to have service learning in science classes. I think there's many ways that once we get talking to partners, we realize that our students actually can provide a lot of really nice services. So I can see this happening in geology classes and physics classes. Some of the partners that I thought about that have data that are collected around Whatcom County are data on energy efficiency in buildings, energy efficiency in automobiles. I can see that fitting in really well in engineering or physics classes. So it's just a little thinking outside the box about who's out there in the community and how some of these interdisciplinary fields actually really fit in nicely in some of our more traditional coursework. Again, the students are getting an experience that's going to relate directly to hopefully what they're going to do when they leave Western.