Aquarium & Fab Lab

Honors students frequently get together to take full advantage of on- and off-campus activities and build community whenever possible. The past couple of weeks, they were able to take a break from preparing for final exams and writing papers by visiting UT’s Fab Lab and the Tampa Aquarium.

The FabLab is a “maker’s space.” Here’s how they describe themselves: “The Fab Lab, a digital fabrication lab inside R.K. Bailey Art Studios, offers an architecturally sophisticated, technologically advanced space for students in the arts. The Fab Lab focuses on entrepreneurs and gives the students, as well as faculty, the opportunity to turn their ideas and dreams into prototypes and products. The imaginative and aesthetically focused spaces create an ideal environment for art and design majors to foster creativity and innovation.”

The Aquarium, located in Channelside, boasts a lush mangrove tunnel, native fish, river otters, and alligators are in Wetlands of Florida habitat and a 500,000-gallon panoramic Coral Reef Gallery that is home to impressive sharks, stingrays, sea turtles, barracudas, and more. What’s more is that it’s only a trolley-ride from campus.

Symposium: Tim Hart

Dr. Hart is an Associate Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Tampa, whose areas of interest include survey research, applied statistics, geographic information systems (GIS), and victimization. His scholarship appears in top peer-reviewed academic journals in his discipline, including the Journal of Quantitative Criminology, the Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, Criminal Justice and Behavior, and the British Journal of Criminology. He has been awarded numerous research grants, including studies funded by the Queensland Police Service, Australian Institute of Criminology, the National Institute of Justice, and the Bureau of Justice Statistics. In 2021, he received the Excellence in Scholarship and Research award from the University of Tampa’s College of Social Sciences, Mathematics, and Education. His symposium today was titled “Crime Risk Estimation: An Introduction to Hot Spot Analysis.” In this talk, he discussed the Geometry of Crime and the Law of Crime Concentration, tessellating shapes, and how probability is used to evaluate the accuracy of crime forecasts.

Oxford – Caitlyn Walley

Hi everyone! 

The semester here is ending but it has been a whirlwind of adventure ever since I arrived. I came to England a few weeks early to travel around Europe before starting the semester. I traveled to countries such as Italy, Greece, Croatia, Montenegro, and several others. Arriving in Oxford I was so welcomed by OSAP and all the other students studying here. Within 30 minutes of arriving in Oxford I was already sharing a taxi with another student I had never met before. Everyone was ready for an adventure. 

I’ve enjoyed the trips we’ve taken with OSAP and encourage anyone who studies abroad through this program in the future to take advantage of them as well. I was able to go to London, Bath, and Cambridge. I can confidently say I made at least one lifelong friend while I’ve been here.  

The tutorial system provided a lot of flexibility. It has been nothing like I imagined. You can complete your essays from anywhere so long as you have the right materials. As I write this, I am waiting at the airport about to hop on a flight to Ireland for the weekend. Never did I think I would be able to say something like that.  

I ended up learning something entirely different than I thought I would be walking into this for one of my tutorials. I had no prior knowledge of the topic and my tutor still worked with me to come up with a great curriculum. Both of my tutors requested entirely different writing styles which was difficult to adapt to at first but that is life! Not everyone will want the same format and adaptation is necessary. Every week in my conservation tutorial brought new and interesting topics to delve into. In my green energy tutorial, I learned more about the economics behind implementation than I thought I would ever know. I have learned and grown while I’ve been here both academically and personally. I look forward to travelling a bit more as the semester closes and can’t wait to bring my stories back to UT. 

See you all soon!