Hey Club!

I just received the information for the NESA Regional competition that is being held at Penn State from February 23-25, 2007. The registration fee is $65 per student, and the hotel rooms will be $62 plus tax per night. The registration fee includes a t-shirt, snack on Friday night, Saturday morning breakfast, Saturday lunch, Saturday evening banquet and dance, and a continental breakfast on Sunday.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with what goes on at Regionals, I’d first like to stress that it is a TON of fun (seriously!). On Saturday morning, we will be doing livestock judging in an arena. We will rotate in stations of beef cattle, dairy cattle, horses, sheep, pigs, and a "mystery category", and for each category we will be ranking the animals in order of best to worst. Don’t worry if you have never judged livestock before, most of us haven’t! We’ll have some practice sessions beforehand so everyone has a basic idea of what to look for. Then in the afternoon, we will be doing the quiz bowl and paper presentations. Quiz bowl teams will consist of 4 quiz-bowlers plus one presenter (or it can be a 4 person team and one person will have to do both quiz bowl and a presentation). The quiz bowl is basically like jeopardy where each person holds a buzzer and whoever buzzes in first gets to answer the question. Most of the questions are of topics we have covered in our animal science classes…many are from ANSC101!! It follows tournament-style elimination, and the final two teams face off in front of everyone. The paper presentations are a review of peer-reviewed research articles, where we present the topic in front of judges using a power point presentation. They are limited to 8 minutes long. It really isn’t as scary as it sounds, I’ve presented the past 2 years and it’s really quick and painless. The banquet and dance on Saturday night is beyond amazing, enough said.

So far the plan is to rent university vans to drive up there Friday mid-morning, and we will return on Sunday afternoon.

I highly encourage you all to attend Regionals, it is a great way learn more about livestock, as well as a time to bond with fellow Animal Science Club members. If you are interested, take a moment to ponder it and please reply to me at jscib@udel.edu by WEDNESDAY December 6th at midnight. You will need to make a check out to Animal Science Club for the $65 registration fee. You can give the checks to us on Wednesday evening at Longwood Gardens, or you can put them in the Animal Science Club mailbox in 104 Townsend Hall by FRIDAY afternoon.
Also, if you have written any paper reviews of any topic involving animal science, even if you are not planning on attending the competition, please email me (jscib@udel.edu) the word document of the paper, as well as the power point if you have one. If we cannot come up with enough pre-made presentations, we will have to write them up ourselves, and I’m pretty sure no one would really want to do that.

Remember, if you plan on going to NESA in February, email me (again, jscib@udel.edu) by this Wednesday to let me know you’re in, and include your t-shirt size (S-XL). If you have any questions regarding the competition, or anything really, don’t hesitate to ask!!
Good luck studying for exams…

Love, Jenna