Colvin said she finds expedition leaders are a self-selected group of faculty and graduate students who like meeting new people and are comfortable with the idea of field research as a group experience. This trip offers a journey through the cultural and biological diversity of the Andean country and visits some of the other finished and ongoing expedition research projects there. The expedition serves as a fund-raiser for the program's scholarship fund. The trips generally last a week to two weeks, although some adventures have a few sessions, so that people can participate for longer periods of time. It takes a hardy breed of volunteers who are expecting to work, Colvin has learned.
People have a strong sense of what they are getting into.
This year, for instance, while some research participants will be living in private homes and hotels in Spain while assisting anthropologists looking at prehistoric paintings or in a comfortable house in the Aran Islands of Ireland while excavating artifacts from medieval churches, others will be roughing it in sleeping bags while collecting fossils in the Utah wilderness or counting small mammals in a Chilean national park in the Andes. Some of the expeditions require special skills, such as snorkeling to do research among the coral reefs in the Virgin Islands or speaking German and knowing how to map for a study of reindeer hunters and early farmers in southern Germany. The size of the research crews ranges from four to 15. The next research proposal deadline will be April 6.