Albert Chow’s personal website on Mission 2008 in MIT

Brief record on the process

This year, the focus of Mission is the Galapagos Islands. More than 100 students were divided in two sections – Iguanas and Tortugas, and each section was divided in five teams. I was assigned to Iguanas team 4, to study the San Cristobal Island in depth before the five teams merge together and work out a plan for the three objectives of the Mission.

Originally, everyone in Iguanas team 4 had not much idea what and how to research on the island we were assigned to. Almost everyone in our team is horrified by the idea of making so many websites, as none of us were good at it (some of us may be good at it now) and I myself had no experience in making webpages whatsoever. Perhaps the chaotic situation and the ineffective team meetings made a few of our team members dropped the subject.

It was not until very late September, i.e. when the first deadline of the team website is due, that we finally decided we needed to move on, and really do something. Alarmed by the withdrawal of several teammates, the remaining team members did pay effort into doing research and constructing a good initial website. However, we were basically restricted to primitive online search only, as none of the team members really knew how the library systems and the databases worked. I was responsible for getting basic and general information on San Cristobal and after several days of researching I gathered what I thought was a huge chunk of material and refined it into a coherent page.

The October deadline soon came and all of us were glad to see the outcome. However, the response we received was not so positive. We needed more ‘scholarly’ materials instead of general knowledge on the internet. The first two weeks of October was the time when I begin to explore the databases of MIT and trying to find specialized information about the islands instead of general stuff. The result was another webpage about the ongoing wind project on San Cristobal.

The November deadline had approached much faster than we thought. While other subjects were keeping us busy, we continued to squeeze time for the team website, but progress was not satisfying. Eventually we had to launch a scheme in which we were supposed to meet everyday at 10pm so that we could get a decent website done. That was when I realized the profoundness of the MIT databases and other people’s ability in researching. My contribution is another chunk of information on the fishery and related topics of San Cristobal.

My final contribution to Iguanas team 4 was the represent the team in the group of Objective 1 when the five teams merged into three groups according to the three objectives. Life was not easy in November as I had to pick up new ideas and do researches which other people seemed to have done before. Quite an amount of reading but not much significant contribution resulted. Finally I wrote a paper on the conflicts of fishermen and conservationists on the Galapagos, as that would shape our view and hence our plan on the islands. The objective group also worked well to generate the following draft for presentation a week ago.

And now the deadline for personal website has arrived. I would say I had a good, and more importantly, new experience in Iguanas of Mission 2008.