“BACK IN BLACK!” Connor and I screamed along to the quintessential AC/DC song blaring from my car speakers as we crept up Little Scaly Mountain at 5 miles per hour — a classic Thursday/Friday activity for us. Spotify’s “Tailgate Party'' playlist was an essential motivator for us as we did our best to chip away at our research question, examining the efficacy of Motus towers using drones. While there were some breezy (but not TOO breezy or else the drone would be at risk) days of field work, our project also included challenges: more than 30,000 lines of Excel data and app malfunctions galore, to name two. Treating research days like a tailgate put us in a good, prepared mindset — we were ready to tackle our excessive data, even though it was a lofty task.
I like to think of my time in Highlands as a super long extension of our “tailgates” on Thursdays and Fridays. Drone research made up the bulk of my schedule, but everything else about the program warranted tailgate hype as well. As we learned, failure is a critical part of the scientific process — it shows you what doesn’t work, and sometimes it’s just entertaining. We had no shortage of failures, and they were important for advancing both science and morale. After all, how would you be able to recognize the epic highs of Highlands without experiencing the epic lows?
Something I learned within the first month of Highlands was that I could not be dancing in the moonlight with a drone — it’s illegal to fly drones after dusk unless you use anti-collision lights. That was my first epic low of Highlands: in order to fly drones, I had to pass a federal remote pilot exam. I studied every night for a month, filling my brain with information about regulations and airspace classifications. But when the big moment came, I experienced my first epic Highlands high: I passed the exam and got a fancy license card! We are the champions of learning in this program, even if I didn’t initially care about drones. It’s all part of the tailgate experience; sometimes you don’t get to choose the activity, but you rally anyway.
Aside from the drone project, I developed bad blood with one element of our capstone project: the face shield I had to wear when filtering caddisflies. In a massive microplastics research endeavor, one of my tasks was to “digest” caddisflies in hydrogen peroxide so we could see microplastics in them with a microscope. Since it was concentrated hydrogen peroxide, I had to wear a face shield, goggles, and my regular glasses — on top of two pairs of gloves and a lab coat. The fact that I was sweating more than I have at actual tailgates was one of my epic lows. After a day of wearing all that gear, we realized the face shield was not necessary because all of the filtering is done under the fume hood to minimize plastic contamination. The next time I digested caddisflies felt like a party of epic highs in comparison. We bumped some tunes, developed a rhythm, and got the job done in no time — it was a caddisfly tailgate for sure.
Tailgates are typically hosted out of cars. I have a crippling fear of other people throwing up, so long car rides in the mountains are not my jam. Unfortunately, that is a requirement for every field trip we went on this semester. These epic low car rides of mine were entirely outweighed by the epic highs the field trips brought, though. We got to set up climbing ropes at Pickens Nose, and I tried real rock climbing for the first time. Additionally, we got to spend a class day kayaking on the Little Tennessee River and listening to Margaritaville — one of my all-time favorite outdoor activities. The transportation may have been scary, but field trip days balanced relaxing and excitement just like a tailgate would.
One of the final epic lows of Highlands was realizing I would be sharing a room with two people for the whole semester when the longest I had shared a room prior was for two weeks. I was nervous, but it turned out to be a Party in the USA. Every day has been full of at least one epic high, whether it’s chats with my roomies before bed, trips to Cookout after the gym, laughs in the kitchen as we balance 17 people using two stoves, making new friends at a job, or watching a movie in Weyman with a mug of hot chocolate. Tailgates’ primary focus is the people, after all.
It’s hard to look back on my tailgate here in Highlands and not think of some of the things that intimidated me at first — from science to carsickness. But none of those things managed to overshadow the epic highs of Highlands, no matter how bad I thought they were at the moment. As long as you don’t stop believin’, the epic highs will always beat the epic lows, and the tailgate will still rock.
— Elise Trexler