Summer Mentorship Hours

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Blog 2 - Summer Mentorship

At Pomona College's Organic Farm, the community in Claremont and on the campus of Pomona College itself united in a mission to eat healthily and sustain a sustainable, well-kept, resourceful produce center 

This was the perspective from my seat in the Brody Botanical  Center's classroom where my first class for the Community Science Academy took place; I took a blue folder so that I may compile handouts I receive and I adopted an iPad and keyboard, which served me well in keeping notes

1. List the contact name, phone number, and organization of the person with whom you volunteered.

• Joy Lam

Arroyo Food Co-op

volunteers@arroyofoodcoop.com 

• Dr. Julius Su

Community Science Academy

(626) 395-2468

jsu@caltech.edu

AND

James Maloney

Community Science Academy

maloney@caltech.edu

2. What qualified this person as an expert in your topic choice?    

• At Caltech, both James and Julius are co-directors of the programs Community Science Academy and Summer Research Connection, therefore working in the Caltech Center for Teaching Learning Outreach .  Julius is also a co-founder of Su-Kam Intelligent Education Systems (SKIES), which supplies a collaborative learning app to any mobile device, and holds a B.S. degrees in Biology and Physics and a PhD in chemistry from Caltech.  He teaches chemistry classes alongside professors at Caltech, and has received Teacher’s Assistant awards for these efforts.  James works as a coordinator for Caltech Classroom Connection (CCC), this program exposing K-12 grade students to college studies through college student visits to their classrooms and info sessions regarding Caltech milestones and its admissions process.  He hold a B.S. degree in physics from the University of Florida and a M.S. in physics from Caltech.  Joy Lam emigrated from China about ten years ago after attending community elementary and college level schools.  She settled down in Altadena and is the head of the board of directors as well as the store manager for the Pasadena Co-op.  In retrospect, James and Julius have the necessary experience and knowledge of subjects such as chemistry and biology to supply me with an understanding of the more quantitative and concrete aspects and benefits of urban farming.  On the other hand, Joy has given me a more relaxed view of the topic and has therefore been a perfect reference towards the most dynamic factors of urban farming, such as community involvement, that immigrating from one country to another can contribute to understanding.  I look forward to seeing how her childhood was different from the one that can be provided if urban farming is in full practice.

3. List three questions for further exploration now that you've completed your summer hours.

→ How is urban farming encouraging urban residents to make a living from hand grown products?

→ In what ways is the care of certain crops on a urban farm helpful in the survival of certain organisms that are considered vital for the Southern California ecosystem?  How does the addition of an urban farm make a city more habitable for native wildlife?

→ How is urban farming redefining the relationship a farmer has to his or her work environment?

4. What is the most important thing you gained from this experience? Why?

• When I was in middle school, I had a very idyllic view of where food came from.  In this way, I saw vast farmland as solely necessary for food production, where the farmer is a job out of many that ensures endless bounty in a supermarket.  As far as I could see, there only existed food in packages or in neatly stocked shelves, and ease triumphed over insight.  Coming to age and into junior high, I was hit with elevated levels of uric acid in my system, and endured long hours of excruciating pain in my joints around 5 times a week.  I asked myself “Why?” when I felt a million needles seemingly break through my bone, asked myself “When will this vicious cycle stop?”.  I was young and slightly naive of how biology worked and related to chemistry; thus I had no explanation.  This was my life, until I met with a naturalist who looked at my eyes, their anatomy, and determined that my unhealthy eating habits and overconsumption of processed goods were what failed my body of the nutrition it so desperately needed.  In essence, I was living through the side-effects of what I didn’t know about being healthy and not knowing what I was really placing in my mouth.  After this realization, and reading up on the idea behind nutrition and moderation, I started to eat ‘healthy’ and from then on, my mom shopped at places like Whole Foods, places that chose its products consciously.  In essence, my family and I started to pay more attention at the origin of food, rather than where it went.  Alas, I was introduced to the complex world of farming and how smaller farms were what society needed to reach a more sustainable balance of consumption and production.  No longer did undisturbed crop lines tantalize me into ignorance.  I gained an interest in urban farming and shopping for fresh goodies that are brought to my plate with very little transportation.  If the food I ate was brought from afar, it had better have been worth the trip.  Thus began my obsession with reading the ingredients in sealed boxes I bumped into, and my research into where food comes from.  This summer, I realized  why urban farming means so much to my lifestyle and that it will motivate me into its next phase this fall.  The most important thing I was able to arrive at from my experiences this summer: seeing how urban farming is about everyone’s personal relationship to nature.  This idea is a catalyst for community growth - mingling like-minded people with those who hadn’t before cared about the subject at hand -, and the growth of each human being’s understanding of what it means to live on Earth.  Urban farming equips people with social responsibility, and this allows for those who are involved to contribute to the environment rather than solely exploit.  Knowing how much of an impact each one of us has is never more clear than when we plant a crop, see it grow, and taste the food it provides, as well as the wildlife it supports.  I have realized that if we connect back to how to interact with the soil beneath our feet through urban farming, we can be inclined to think more about conservation and the environmentally harmful practices widely in use on corporate farms.  Urban farming is as much about awareness as it is about being biologically healthy.  Now that I have understood the true goal of my senior project thesis, I can now move forth into characterizing its benefits and seeing how it can become a more commonplace practice.
  
  
  
  
  

  

  The topmost picture shows the colorimeter I had a chance in using to detect the colors present in samples of liquids; learning about a plethora of scientific topics with ranging difficulties took much energy from my, forcing me to eat voraciously on lunches provided during CSA, these including subway sandwiches 

  
  

5. What is your senior project topic going to be?  How did mentorship help you make your decision?  Please explain.

I plan on exploring the environment, social, and economic benefits in store for Southern California if it were to invest in urban farming for my senior project.  In this way, I’d like to gage the overall impact of this new lifestyle, and then apply whatever local effects the switch has to the world stage, how the practice can make humanity as a whole more sustainable.  To address each of these categories, I would first need to define the term ‘benefits’, which should relate to the preservation of a healthy economy, environment, and social centers like the small town, family based community present in Claremont and Pasadena.  After seeing how passionate the staff is at the Arroyo Co-op, and how driven the volunteer student farmers are at Pomona College’s Organic Farm, I feel like urban farming is a perfect platform for getting people to start caring about growing the economy through rewarding small-time farmers with ethical farming practices that yield fresh produce, conserving our natural resources through growing produce without any negative impact on the environment, and building true bonds with each other by uniting behind a cause that is believable.  These three benefactors shall all in turn, as I conclude my senior project, make urban farming the only choice as far as buying food and making it possible on your plate in the first place are concerned.  

As I wrap up my thesis, I’d would like to pursue a small tangent in relation to the detailed-oriented, mind blowing techniques I learnt in lab at Caltech.  Applying chemistry to analyze of the progress of urban farming, as could be shown through increased nitrogen levels in the soil and a greater presence of nutrient-producing bacteria colonies, can be extremely helpful in gaining proof that urban farming is indeed relevant in making our Earth more cared for.  In this way, urban farming can further provide for the social aspect of society through making it necessary for students of its trade to know the ropes of lab protocol in making sure urban farming is reaching its full potential.

Working in lab during the last two weeks of CSA gave me insight into how urban farming can be looked at from a quantitative perspective, with evidence backing up its effects on the environment especially to suffice; the middle image is one I took on my lab 'cubicle, complete with a fume-proof hood; I shall always re-cant the memories, and suspiciously filled glass vials, leftover from this summer