Getting to Know Me!

Photo of me from summer 2011. From my personal collection.

My name is Lynda Forsyth and I am a second year student at the University of Alberta. Currently I am working towards my Bachelor of Science in Animal Health with a major in Food Animals, and I hope to someday work in either the horse or cattle industry. I have always been obsessed with horses. As a child, each week I would bring home armloads of books on different horse breeds from the library, and would spend hours absorbing all the information they contained. The passion continued, and when I was 16, I began to work at a summer horse camp; a program I have been hired to coordinate for the summer of 2012. In my first year of university I discovered a whole new world that most city kids are not given much opportunity to experience: agriculture.  Though I am still trying to figure out what exactly I want to do with my life, I know I am going to follow these passions both old and new.

In my experience I have found that the both the horse and agriculture industries are fairly tight-knit, as everyone seems to know everybody else. In this way, effective communication is essential when attempting to break into either of these fields. Currently, I am primarily using email and face-to-face conversations to develop a network, but I am interested to see how social networking websites could be used to reach even more possible employers across the country and maybe even around the world. I am also interested in the idea of communications and marketing for agricultural brands using social networking websites. I was not aware that major agricultural companies used sites like Twitter and Facebook until I read a blog by one of my classmates Dani Young who talked about how she follows Cargill on Twitter. Upon reading that information on her blog I decided to do some research of my own on how connected agricultural companies are on social networking sites and I found a presentation on http://www.slideshare.net/farmsdotcom/social-media-for-the-agriculture-industry. This presentation illustrated that 54% of producers use some form of social networking, and 18% of large producers use podcasts; statistics that are much higher than I expected.

I am planning to use this blog to further investigate the relationship between the agriculture industry and social networking websites, and I hope to learn how best to advertise my skills and experiences online for the purposes of my future career.

*Background image is from my personal photos