First Year Seminar 191CNS2 - FYS- Topics in CNS

First-year (R1ST) Course Title: The Science, History and Magic of Sticks
What is a stick? How have people valued them over time? How can you use them to solve problems in your life? How can we tell them apart, anyway? We?ll walk around campus picking up sticks of different species and discussing their science, history, magic and management, using all senses available to us to learn more about these little bits of wood on the ground.
Our conversations will include the engineering concepts of tension, compression, bending: how sticks (and trees) break to end up on the ground in the first place. We?ll discuss pollarding, coppicing, biochar, wattle and daub as well as folklore including dowsing. Along the way, we?ll highlight some of the less-conventional offerings at UMass-Amherst (tree climbing! chainsaws! spoon-carving!) for future consideration, explore career paths related to arboriculture and get to know some friendly faces from the UMass Grounds staff.
This course will be outside as much as the weather permits, serving as an introduction to the spatial layout of campus, campus resources and our campus arboretum. By the end, you will know how to discover the identity of campus trees, prepare an herbarium specimen to take home, navigate the physical space of campus with confidence and gain practice with other skills for academic, personal and interpersonal success!