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In high school I took an environmental science class. I loved every minute of it-- since I love the outdoors!

One of my favourite courses I have taken was Biology for Engineers in university. I really enjoyed this course because traditionally, engineering professionals do not take or work with biology but they trialled this course with our year to include it for future years. Because this course was new, I had no expectations or preconceived notions which allowed me to be fully open minded.

The course allowed us to look at biology with an engineering lens; mechanics of why fish swim in a school, why shark skin is the way it is, and how nature works so efficiently. We then took that to look at manmade systems to investigate how we could use nature as influence to make our own systems more efficient.

this course offered a unique view on systems efficiency which I had no thought of before which I thoroughly enjoyed and to this day, it is my favourite university course ever taken, and very high on my list of all courses taken over the years.

One of the last courses I took in my degree program was called Environmental Field Methods. Leading into this course we were required to have completed all of the other usual science courses, biology, chemistry, physics, etc., so I assumed this course would simply build on those pre-requisites. To an extent, that was true, but more importantly, this class was focused on the real-life logistics of trying to run studies out in the field. It's easy to drop a sensor into a tank of water and track temperature fluctuations in a lab for a couple weeks, but what happens when you need to put that sensor in the shallows of a tourist destination beach in the middle of spring break? I can tell you that our class collected a lot fewer sensors than we deployed. All of the studies that we conducted during this course felt like a set-up for failure as we experienced everything from algae growing over a tiny solar panel meant to keep our sensors powered, tourists taking our sensors home as souvenirs, animals chewing through "protective" casings, and a few of us even experienced a trip to the campus nurse as we discovered weird rashes after a day of collecting water samples from a pond. The class truly taught us to consider variables in ways that most of us never had, adapt to challenges that none of us were accustomed to considering, and embrace the less pristine conditions of science outside of the lab. Years after this class, as a PM, I woke up to a phone call at 3am letting me know that an intoxicated driver had just driven through the entrance of a store we had nearly finished renovating, and it was like deja vu to showing up for an early low tide to find a 6ft deep hole in the exact place I had buried a sensor. Most classes teach you the right way to do things, but this one taught us how to fail constantly, and I can say with confidence, the teachings were much more memorable.

Any time there is a clear learning objective, content to support multiple learning styles, with a consistent reward/feedback system throughout the content, I am a happy learner.

I took a hybrid English Honors class in college, where this was a key theme. We studied learning styles; researching using online learning platforms such as Coursera and similar methods. We then applied that learning to both a group project and an individual paper on a specific topic (slow food, in this case). Ongoing discussions, group challenges, and feedback sessions kept things engaging. While there were multiple mediums, we also found varied perspectives which made the outcomes interesting.

This is a hard question! I am a lifelong learner. I've been struggling for a few days now trying to narrow it down. For those StrengthFinder fans, learning is my #1 strength (followed by collector, which means I collect trivia so put me in the CashCab with you!). For classes, any class with hands-on application is going to be a favorite. Academically, it was my Synthetic Organic chemistry class which is why I'm a chemist. In SmartsheetU, the Bridge class was one of my favs. Currently, since I've taken up birding, I'm in a birding class and every weekend we go on fieldtrips. Beside the constant game of Marco Polo that you play with the birds (you listen to try to find them), the activity forces you to be totally present in the moment and outside in nature. For these reasons, my birding class is my favorite class.

My favorite course this year was one we set up in office last week with Smartsheet. Our trainer (shout out to Alyson Englebrecht) was professional, funny, knowledgable, and took on all our questions excitedly. We were able to customize the course to our participants (ranging from first timers, to intermeidate, to PMs looking for a solution) and I couldn't be happier with how it turned out. For an Smartsheet junkie like myself, it was great to see new ways of using the product and to have a refresher on a few tips/tricks I had forgotten.