Graduate students will organize field seminars as collecting trips to various regions. Students will collect, curate and organize specimens that will go into the teaching collection, outreach collection and research collections of the department. Field seminars will be presented by experts so that students may learn diverse field techniques. Through the course of a typical graduate program most students become highly focused experts on a small group of insects in a targeted habitat type or on some detailed aspect of an organism's biology through laboratory studies. It is necessary to purposefully broaden the experience of students with increased opportunities to expand their experience.
Field trips provide a form of didactic education that surpasses the classroom lecture.
Field seminars will provide students with direct access to experts in the department on the level of peers in a fun, hands-on and informative way. Some of the finest bottomland hardwood forest left in the state and strange sandy uplands of the Sparta Sand formation. To understand the differences in our three localities it is necessary to know a little bit about geology of the area. The layers alternate between sandy formations and clay formations. Sandy formations form high dry ridges while the clay formations form broad valleys.