Hello classmates!  My name is Karolina Powell.  It has been Americanized over the years that I have lived in the United States so now I pronounce it like the state.  I currently live in Muncy, Pennsylvania which is an hour and a half east of State College.  I grew up in Poland and later moved to Chicago before moving to Virginia for school and then Pennsylvania for work.  I currently work in the oil and gas industry in the administrative front for exploration and production companies.  I would love to eventually work in the public sector in the conservation field.  I am taking this class as it is a requirement for my degree, although I am sure it will be good for me as a person considering I have never taken a geography course before.  Otherwise, I am an avid animal lover and outside of work and school, I show and breed rabbits and chickens.

One issue that geography would be well suited to address is the impact of external factors, such as political regional actions, on individual actions.  The first lesson makes a good point when discussing this in regards to deforestation.  A person that sells a tree for money is an economic decision that is impacted by broader and larger scale decisions.  For example, in my current neighborhood, many people cut and sell wood in order to use it for heat.  However, this never occurred when I lived in Chicago.  In our town in Pennsylvania, utility companies have not run natural gas lines to most of the homes despite Pennsylvania producing a huge amount of the country’s natural gas.  Yet, our Congressman’s street did have lines run to it a few years ago and therefore his street would not be part of the same commodity chain as everyone else.  Thus regional politics made an impact on a local economy and this can be explored at even a broader scale.  This sort of issue is what geography would be well suited to explore.