I have my first week of fall classes in the bag! It looks like I’ll be at USF one semester longer than I had planned though. Trying to cram in everything I needed to do in order to graduate in December was just way too much. I was taking 17 credits, but my 4-credit Archaeological Science class turned out not to be what I thought it would be. For whatever reason I thought it would be remote sensing, which is what I wanted to learn, & there’s a little bit of that but it’s a lot more “let’s shoot a bunch of rocks with a laser so we can see exactly which volcano they came from!” which is a really cool thing that SOMEONE can do, I just don’t want to be that person. Anyway it seemed like it was going to be a lot of work for something I wasn’t that interested in, plus it was keeping me from going to Anthropology Club so I nixed it.
My Digital Archaeology class on the other hand looks like it’s going to be AWESOME. It’s all 3D modelling & virtual reality, I spend the whole lecture just drooling over the beautiful recreations & how amazing it is that we can do this stuff & share it with the whole world. You can walk through a laser-scanned model of an archaeological site in some totally different part of the world, put whole museum collections online for anyone to study, manipulate virtual replicas of dinosaur skeletons, it’s just amazing what’s possible with this technology. We have a hands-on project to make a digital recreation that I’m pretty excited about, honestly I’ll probably start playing with the software LONG before we actually learn anything about it. You can see some of the work they do at the USF Center for Virtualization and Applied Spatial Technologies on their Sketchfab account.
So this won’t be my last semester after all but I’m actually pretty glad to be staying. I like USF, I like my apartment, I like my job, there’s no reason to go running out of here just yet.
The Awkward Globetrotter 