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Am I happy with my results? I cannot say that I am happy, but I also cannot say that I am upset with my overall experience in this soils class. It gave me a better view of how truly dedicated one must be to want to pursue a career in soils. I was not fully aware of the obstacles that I was to face, but with a little help from people I have met along the way, I can hopefully say I passed this class. This option for the favorite soil report 3 gave me a hopefulness that I can pass. It was a long process, with making an animated video to blogging about my experience. Overall taking this soils educated me about something that effects me and my everyday life more in depth. I definitely have more respect for those that partake in this particular aspect of agriculture and science.

Problems came about all throughout my experience in the soils class. Whether it was trying to connect the lectures to the lab, the readings, soil math or even just lab reports. The entire process was a challenge, and it was definitely a learning experience. For this specific project, creating a website that is open for anyone to see was definitely the biggest problem I faced. It is hard to put something out there for people to read, and judge but eventually that feeling passed. Then another problem hit me, trying to figure out how to answer the questions. Although the tip and tricks online explained how to find what element dominated my soil, it ultimately did not explain it in a way for me to fully understand anything I was doing.

Taking a soils class may seem easy, because really how hard can learning about dirt be? Well, form the moment I told my father ( a third generation rancher) that I was taking a soils class he told me that I better be prepared to take the hardest class I have ever taken. Little did I know that it was an understatement. Learning about things the first few weeks, trying to keep up with the reading (100 pages per lecture) and also trying to find the correlation between lecture and lab were a struggle. But finally realizing that soil impacts the my everyday life prominently. Applying the four fundamental equations learned at the beginning of the semester and using those to see the correlation between soil and everything it is used for – from growing crops, to producing oxygen and even the effects it has on the environment – really was a turning point in my view about soils.