Amazing student: Sam Tingle

Foundation Fellow Sam Tingle has been able to learn around the world — from the South Pacific to Malaysia to the Greek Island of Lesvos — but has also immersed himself in academics and activities on campus:

Current employment: 

I am currently working with NASA doing research through a NASA DEVELOP node here at UGA. This semester, I am working on a team that is using imagery from NASA satellites to assess threats to river water quality and mangrove health in the Osa Peninsula of Costa Rica.

...

In the spring of my sophomore year, I studied abroad through the South Pacific and investigated sustainable development in the sociopolitical and environmental contexts of Hawaii, New Zealand, Australia and Fiji. Through expert instruction, independent research and fieldwork, I was able to take concepts that I learned on UGA’s campus and challenge them against a living reality of climate change and globalization. These three months proved to be a period of greater acquaintance with not only the fields of ecology, anthropology and geography, but also with some of the most wonderful and goony people I’ve met at UGA.

Following the program, I was awarded the Freeman Asia grant to study web development in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I spent the next nine weeks learning to code for eight hours a day, devouring Malaysian cuisine, and binging on South Korean TV with the world’s best AirBnB roommates. By the end of the course, our class was building clones of Facebook and Twitter and had obtained mastery of multiple coding languages.

On a bit of a whim, I left Kuala Lumpur and headed to Rishikesh, India, where I dove into the practice of hatha and ashtanga yoga and trained to become certified as a yoga instructor. I lived in the foothills of the Himalayas for a month, waking up at 5 a.m. six days a week to study the vast knowledge base of yoga and hone my personal practice. The summer culminated in Nepal where I worked at an orphanage in the Chitwan District. Traveling through this stunning country just one year after the devastating 2015 Ghorka earthquake prompted my curiosity into how geography can be applied to disaster management and international development.

Double dawg (B.A. and M.A. in geography) and another Grady College major added in, Tingle is doing a masterful job of getting the most out of his campus experience. He also names some of our great geography faculty members, so read the whole profile. Great people doing amazing things. 

And we always love the giant globe in the geography building for photo shoots.