Welcome!

Hello family and friends! 

This is my new travel blog that will be relating to all my adventures abroad. This is so you can get your British fix and learn some fun and new things about travel, science communication, British education and culture that you may not have known! 

Who am I? If you didn't know already, my name is Kenna. I just graduated from Colorado State University with a B.S. in Biology (technically Botany) and a B.A. in English (technically Creative Writing). My undergraduate honor's thesis specialized in how scientists communicate to the general public, and how creative science writing can be used to tell science stories in a successful way. I interviewed many famous science writers from around the globe to tell their successes and failures in their jobs. 

During my undergraduate career, I was also an intern at the Denver Botanic Gardens. I was their first Medicinal Plant Intern and worked during the summer of 2018. My project was to design, research, and publish a virtual tour on medicinal plants around the Denver Botanic Gardens. This project gave me an opportunity to use my science communication skills, as I combined mythology, history, medicine, culture, science, and of course plants into a fun and engaging tour. Currently, this tour is the 3rd most popular tour on the Denver Botanic Gardens website. If you want to see the tour, click this link: Denver Botanic Gardens Medicinal Plant Tour. Along with the tour, I filmed multiple videos giving practical recipes of some of the medicinal plants within the gardens. I've always been camera-shy, so this was a good challenge for me to be comfortable ad-libbing in front of a camera, talking about science. If you want to follow my Youtube channel for these videos, click the link here: Kenna's Youtube Channel. 

I will be starting my master's degree in Science Communication at Imperial College in London on September 28, 2019. It's a one-year master's program, so I will be living in London for only a year. However, there are plenty of things to see in London, so I will be filling you in on all the touristy (and non-touristy) goings-on around town. 
So what's so special about Imperial College you may ask? Well, it has a 14.3% acceptance rate and approximately 16,610 students. Within my humble program of Science Communication, there are 25 students, four of us being from the U.S.A. We will be interacting with the Science and Media program, which also has 25 students, sharing some classes. Oddly enough, there is one other student in my program who is from Colorado, named Lucy. I'm sure we'll both commiserate about not knowing which direction is west due to lack of the Rocky Mountains. 

Imperial College was founded in 1907 by Prince Albert. In 1851, Prince Albert and Queen Victoria built a cultural and educational center within the Kensington area following the Great Exhibition. Out of this cultural center came Imperial College. Originally, Imperial College was part of the University of London. It wasn't until 2007 that it became its own school. According to Wikipedia, Imperial is ranked 9th globally by the 2019 Times Higher Education World University Ranking, as well as 3rd in Europe and in the UK after Oxford and Cambridge. It currently houses the UK's largest brain bank and has a special center for Climate Change research. It is also the birthplace of the rock band Queen. They have a plaque and everything commemorating the event. 

So you could say attending a college that was created by Queen Victoria and boasts of having Queen as one of their rock band alumni is pretty bad-ass. I will just have to see what their Science Communication program is like. Hopefully, I find the right classroom! 
Until next week, keep calm and carry on! 
Kenna