My name is Gina Cowhick and I go to Colorado State University. In Colorado, a lot of people have come to Colorado to go hiking and exploring, so it's been a cool way to make friends. I definitely feel a lot calmer; I tend to be a very anxious person, especially with school. Whenever I'm hiking or camping, I can just relax. And there's, of course, a lot less people and it has more calming  nature noises. It's always been a nice way to ground myself. CSU is a pretty big school, so I'll have classes with like 200 people, and I can feel very awkward and stressed; there’s just just a lot going on. I’ve definitely been working on it, and I think I'm getting a lot more comfortable in university and just in general, and I will do things by myself. But for a while, that was really scary and I didn't want to do anything by myself. But then coming back to nature: I'll set my hammock up on campus or something and I've come to really enjoy that alone, just read my book or take a nap. 

When I was little my mom used to enroll me in a bunch of sports. I was like five years old, six, maybe, and I was sitting in the goal playing with dandelions. And I was weaving them together and taking them apart–the petals–and trying to see the inside of the dandelion because I wanted to see underneath the flower. So I remember just being in the soccer goal doing that, and so ever since then, I’d go on hikes and I'd always take apart plants and try to see what was inside and see where the seeds were. 

So I'm an undergrad research assistant at a plant science lab at CSU. Technology is becoming such a big part of the world and everything, and I think that being able to put that to good use and get some bigger issues like crop loss, money loss, all those kinds of things and combine them I think it's a pretty cool tool. It shows everything's connected.