Practicum-- Angela

Hey all! My project is focused on a special interest group. I've chosen rock climbing/mountaineering as my group since it's something I already enjoy but haven't followed very much on the internet. I just spent some time on one of my sites mountainproject.com which is probably the top website for information about climbs around the United States and is becoming a good international guide book as well. Aside from being a really helpful online guidebook, the site has an extensive forum for people to discuss everything from camp cooking to climbing partner finding. While reading the forum this evening I came across an interesting post on risk taking in climbing. The author posted a link to an article in Psychology Today about why people take risk and focused specifically on climbers as risk takers. It was a fairly length article (with contributions from a UW psych professor) and afterwords I read the posts following the author's which came to the conclusion that most people climb to relax rather than take risks and that the article was incorrect to a degree about climbing as a risky endeavor. All in all it was very interesting, both the article and the comments. I'm definitely going to enjoy this assignment and both reading and contributing to the forum was pretty fun. In case anyone's interested, here's the link for the article: http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200910/risk