Hello everyone, my name is Kevin Hosterman. I live about ten minutes off campus at home in an area known as Lemont. I grew up right here in State College, and have lived here for my entire life. My major here at Penn State is Security Risk Analysis. Even more specifically I am in the Information and Cyber Security option for SRA. I hope to graduate and get a job working for either the government or a big business working on network security. I am interested in this course because in some of my other past classes I have taken we have talked about Geography, but have never gone in-depth on the topic. I saw this class as an opportunity to change that. An interested fact about me is that my grandfather was the Penn State men’s soccer coach in the 50’s and won two national championships.
       After being introduced to the breadth of perspectives in the field of geography it has really opened my eyes. I didn’t realize how much geography really covers as a field of study. The two that caught my attention the most was the Social Science perspective, and visualization. I think these two would be combined would be a great way to address the issue of deforestation. Deforestation is just one of the millions of ways that humans affect the environment here on Earth. Plenty of animals have lost their homes and gone extinct due to this process. Not only are we hurting other animals with this process, but hurting ourselves by taking away the trees that produce oxygen for our atmosphere. I think using visualization to show us where the remaining trees are and where trees having been cut down is a great way of informing people. Cutting down a forest doesn’t seem like much until you look at a map of the entire planet and realizing that there are hundreds of forests being cut down at the same time.