After nearly a week of planning and scheduling, my friend Alice and I were finally able to visit the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). We were the first two people to exit our last class of the day when we were dismissed just so we could arrive at AMNH even a few minutes earlier. We both shared an interest in dinosaurs but before we could go and see the dinosaur exhibit, we had to do our lab field exercise. When we took a look at our field exercise, we saw that it was divided into three parts, each part for a different exhibit. For the first two parts, we had to go the Hall of Biodiversity and the Felix M. Warburg Hall of New York State Environment but we were allowed to go to any exhibit we preferred for our last part. There were around 25 questions in total we had to answer before we could go to our choice exhibit and we figured that it wouldn’t be long before we could see the dinosaurs. Twenty minutes later, two slightly stressed out girls sat down to continue their staring contest with the first question of the lab exercise. Needless to say, the lab report was a lot more challenging than we gave credit for it and by the time we got to our choice exhibit, my enthusiasm for seeing dinosaurs had diminished.

Even though my trip to AMNH wasn’t the best, as I felt stressed and confined to certain exhibits, I felt that this kind of trip was more meaningful than if I had free reign over which exhibits to go to and had no questions to answer. The reason I feel this way is that at the end of the day, I went to an exhibit that I was interested in and at the same time, I went to exhibits that I never would’ve visited. This meant that I was able to learn about things that I would’ve never learned about in a casual visit to the museum and at the same time was more forced to be more attentive to my surroundings. On a normal visit, I would probably ignore large blocks of text on the wall or any kind of text that was not within eye level. However, with the questions we had to answer for the lab exercise, I payed attention to these text and more often then not, found myself interested in the information within.