Focus on Creative Inquiry

Last week's focus on creative inquiry symposium was very interesting event. It was a great chance for all of the creative inquiry teams at Clemson to get together and showcase their hard work for the semester. There were over 100 posters and they all covered a unique topic. This symposium was an excellent chance to ask questions of one another and learn about other areas of research. For instance, I learned from a poster about pain thresholds and how it relates to genders as well as importance of body parts. Although there were many other posters I spent most of my time at the event discussion our poster. Many people were interested to learn that fishermen are missing the areas of highest crab abundance even though they are inside the legal areas. I explained how our data showed that fishermen base their fishing effort on salinity and that crab abundance is also based on salinity. I was often asked why fishermen are unable to effectively fish for crabs if they have the proper methods for finding them and I explained how we believe that salinity and crab abundance in the rivers has changed dramatically over the past few years in response to the drought and then recent rains. Discussing our poster was very interesting, but it wasn't until I walked around and talked to other teams that I gained a full perspective of the event. This was a great opportunity to learn about hundreds of different research projects going on in different fields all across campus and to be able to take in such a vast amount of information in one place was an incredible opportunity and I am glad I was able to take part in it.