It’s been a busy first half of my first semester of graduate school.

I’m taking Environmental Planning Law, Introduction to Geographic Information Systems, Introduction to Transportation and Land Use Planning, and a little something I like to call Statistics for Social Scientists.  I’m also on the editorial board of the student-run Berkeley Planning Journal, as well as the graduate student researcher tasked with transitioning the journal to an open content format online.

On a whim, I submitted applications to three projects outside the Berkeley Department of City and Regional Planning:

• The poster competition at the Energy and Resources Collaborative (BERC) Symposium and Innovation Expo at Berkeley. The topic – parklets as a cheap infrastructure improvement to improve walkability, and thus reduce driven trips and greenhouse gas emissions.
• The poster competition at the Association of Pedestrian and Bicycle Professionals at their annual conference in Charlotte, North Carolina. Again, parklets, but this time as an innovative public-private financed tool.
• The fall video series on the MIT Community Innovators Lab Radio. Granted, I’ve never produced a video involving more than two people or longer than 8 minutes, but the Center for Community Preservation and Planning in my Georgia hometown has a story that deserves telling, and iMovie is supposed to be pretty straightforward.

Of course I didn’t realize I’d get accepted to all three, and everything would happen in the last half of October. So it goes.

Staring down two mid-terms, a red-eye, five interviews, and a high school football game in the next 48 hours, this seems like a good time to take a blogging break to celebrate one tiny victory. Behold, my first academic poster.