I’m planning a LEGO model to commemorate my time in college

I graduate this spring with a degree in environmental science. I’ve spent three years at this university after transferring from my old one.

LEGO’s been a lifelong hobby and passion. In the last year, I’ve started trying to design my own models. Why not give myself more practice while also giving myself a graduation gift? Besides, so many of my college projects have related to LEGO. I’ve done research projects and essays about my hobby, it seems fitting.

I’ve spent a bit of time coming up with ways to represent each course I’ve taken in the model. The main setting is a riverbank, it’ll be a small campsite a figure representing myself has set up. I took a research course this summer that involved a lot of canoeing, so to represent that one, a canoe will be on the bank. I’ll have some shells, crystals, and rocks in the canoe to represent various geology courses I’ve taken. The cutbank across the stream will have a soil profile for my soils course, and below that will be rock and sediment layers for another course.

I’m getting creative with some of them, with certain features representing different courses. I want a farm drainpipe to lead into the stream, which represents point source pollution from an environmental course. The water near the pipe will be tinted green to represent an algal bloom, indicating eutrophication due to fertilizer runoff. This is a process we covered in an oceanography course. But this also represents a course I took on German-Jewish history, as the scientist who really put synthetic fertilizers on the map was a German Jew.

So many courses need to be represented somehow. Linguistics, music, chemistry, sustainability, volcanology, Islam, hydrology, geomorphology, German, and more. Fortunately, one of LEGO’s old space themes used a torso design for its astronauts that would work perfectly for a shirt with my university’s logo. This covers my course that was essentially an introduction to the university.

I’m really excited to design this. With all the course representations decided, I just need to figure out how to lay it out. I’m going to spend my free time this week making sketches of how it might look. I’ll then use BrickLink’s free program to build a digital model. I plan to buy the parts for it and build it before I graduate. I’ve built countless LEGO sets and I’ve watched so much content about set design, but I’m still new to design. I made an hourglass for a friend last summer (I’ve got a post with photos on my profile if you want to see it), a model of my work, a model of a hydrology process, and a draft of this project that’s completely different than what I’m doing with it now. I’ll be glad to be done with college, it would just be nice to have a little decoration as a reminder of my time here. Plus it gives me an excuse to practice designing.