Hooray, DonorsChoose t-shirt winners!

I'm just thrilled with our final numbers from our DonorsChoose campaign -- because of your generosity, $2953 are going to go help 1,126 needy kids learn some critically important science. And I'm also psyched that Sciencewomen came in second of all the Scienceblogs participating in both amount donated, and numbers of donors (43!!) We came in 4th in terms of the number of students reached. Congratulations, everybody.

I've also finally pulled together the list of winners of our t-shirt drawing. Methods and winners are below!

Okay, so I feel the need to share my "random selection" in a manner similar to my research papers. But I will make it a little more colloquial, I think.

I took all the emails receipts that people sent me, which I found in my gmail account by searching on "donors" "receipt" and "donation" and wrote down folks' names on a piece of paper. So this list was written down semi-disordered. I then numbered the names in reverse order, 'cause I felt like it. Then I went to a random number generator online, put in my specs, clicked "get sequence" and wrote down the first 5 numbers that came up.

I then mapped these numbers to my list of names, and emailed the winners! With their permission, here are our lucky t-shirt recipients:

• Scout Sinclair, a PhD student at Dartmouth
• Karina Anirak, of Ruminations of an Aspiring Ecologist and ecology grad student;
• Jan Fransen of the University of Minnesota Libraries
• Amanda Wright, a biology post-doc at UCSD
• A donor who prefers to remain anonymous

I've invited our winners to send in photos of themselves wearing their new fab shirts - if they are so courageous, I will post the photos here. :-)

I think that wraps things up for DonorsChoose this year. Thanks for playing along!!