Hi, everyone! My name is Melanie DeFrancisco and I’m a sophomore here at Penn State. I’m from Plymouth Meeting, PA, which is about 20 minutes outside of King of Prussia, and I’ve lived there my whole life. I’m currently an Elementary Education (PK-4) major and Special Education minor. I would really love to teach kids as young as I can, or be placed in a high school special education classroom. I’m interested in this course because I’m not really the greatest at geography and so I’m excited to get to learn about it and become better at it. Something interesting about me is that I love to sing and dance and am currently a member and the Public Relations manager for the Penn State Singing Lions, which is Penn State’s only show choir on campus!

One of the main things I was interested to read about was that geography is a lot more than just maps. Obviously, I knew this was true before reading about it, but I didn’t know exactly how. Like I mentioned before, I’ve never been great at geography or science in general, really, so it was nice to know there’s more to it. The topic that really caught my attention was the “Human-Environment Interactions” section. I think this is so relevant to our world today and I think it will be really interesting to learn about. One issue that comes to mind that can be connected to this would be the issue of pollution and how the choices we make can affect our environment negatively, maybe without even noticing it sometimes.