Welcome to week nine. I’m writing this after we’ve just finished our poster session and we’re all starting to pack. Everyone has suitcases in the hallway, those who have to fly are weighing their bags last minute to make sure they aren’t overweight, I made sure I have enough gas to at least get me to the nearest station. All the fun little errands to check off the list. The poster session went really well. So many people came that I felt like I was talking the entire two hours. I slowly felt myself becoming more comfortable giving my spiel over and over. I think I could recite it word for word on a whim’s notice now. I was so glad to see how many people were excited by our work. I was a little worried that my mainly methodological project and many complicated graphs would scare people off but everyone was willing to hear what I had to say. I felt a bit more confident in the work I did afterward and I wasn’t sure I would. So that’s great! Everyone else's posters turned out beautifully as well. Seeing all our hard work come to fruition was such a gratifying and exciting experience. On the personal side of things, we’re getting ready to go to a potluck at Richard’s house with all the REU’s and some of the mentors. I hear Richard is making tuna so I’m very excited about that. I think it will be a nice last get together before we head our separate ways. My time at OIMB has been unforgettable. Literally. Because I immortalized it in this blog. Thanks for reading!
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Sometimes I feel like one of those dogs that can sense earthquakes before they happen. Except I am neither a canine nor a psychic because I can very clearly see and feel the end of the REU approaching. I remember reading the blogs of former interns before my initial interview last March and by the time I reached their week 8 posts they were usually feeling a little melancholy. I understand why. Suddenly all of the events that seemed so far off at the beginning are right around the corner. Our poster session is next Friday and the day after that we all leave. This week I submitted my poster draft for review and we had a peer critique session on Wednesday. I was so grateful for the feedback because after hours of staring at the same figure captions and resizing text boxes by a few millimeters every five minutes to try and make everything symmetrical, there’s only so much objectivity I can continue to hold about my project. Most of the edits I had to correct were about the explanations of my graphs. Since most of my project was data analysis the majority of my results were numbers that I dressed up and plotted against each other in various ways. However, converting numbers into words that effectively communicate their meaning is more difficult than I expected, so I spent most of my time workshopping different explanations of my figures that didn’t require my presence to understand them. I spent quite a bit of time sitting on the jetty this week. There’s this lovely little raised platform in the middle of it that’s very good for stretching out on. I saw a beautiful white crane, two seals, and a very excited puppy all in one jetty-sitting session. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to how gorgeous the scenery is here. Gargantuan pine trees grow out of the sand, random barnacles end up in the parking lot nowhere near shore. Sometimes I like to think of Charleston as its own little snow globe except instead of snow there’s fog. We had an all-hands meeting in Dr. Galloway’s lab this week and I finally got to meet everyone Aaron has taken under his wing. We each took turns explaining something that was going well and going poorly in our personal and professional lives. I found the whole thing very reassuring. Everyone experiences stress but excitement at the same time. I think it must be the nature of the field. I think I need to do some thinking about my future.
What to say about week seven. To start off, I need to stop joking that graphic design is my passion because I’ve been graphic designing all week and it definitely is not. Well, maybe it’ll turn out to be delayed gratification because when my poster is finally finished I think I will feel very relieved and accomplished and I’ll go right back to telling people that I was born to make posters. So as you might have guessed this week was mainly spent creating figures out of my data and crafting my poster. I thought of a few interesting ways to model my data but I’m not sure which graphs will make the final cut. For one, I decided to graph the abundance of kelp in each video across a spatiotemporal axis. Which is a fancy way of saying time and space. The X-axis of the graph is the length of a single video in seconds, the Y-axis is the percentage of kelp present in the video. This way, the viewer can visualize what percentage of kelp appeared in certain segments of a video. The reason I decided to format the figure this way is because I think the density estimates as a single number, abundance per meter squared, is confusing. The value 1.7 bull kelp per square meter doesn’t tell you that 80% of the kelp in the video is concentrated in a six second segment and, in turn, a similarly small physical distance. In the same vein of analysis, I decided to calculate the percentage of each transect that is bare seafloor because I like the way those values contextualize the cold, unfeeling, density estimates in their raw form. On the personal side of things, last week was the invertebrate ball! Flynn and I decided at the very last moment to try and transform into comb jellies. To do so we wrapped blue metallic streamers around our arms and fluorescent blue fairy lights around our legs. I was a little concerned our costumes would fall apart while we were on the catwalk but everything worked out. So many people put so much inspiring effort into their costumes I was very impressed, it made me feel better about my own haphazard attempt. I like the community here because of experiences like that. I still can’t believe we only have two weeks left, I’ll try again next week.
This is the end of week six and I am practicing the very thoroughly researched, corroborated, and peer-reviewed technique called denial. Only three weeks left on the horizon and I don’t know how to react. On one hand I am definitely feeling the familiar, “I think I’m ready to take my last exam and do my final project and then sleep for a week straight” ache that I usually experience at the end of a semester. But the difference is I can whine about all of that with the comfort of knowing I’ll be back at school for another term in a couple months. I might never come back to OIMB. I might never see these hundred foot pines at the base of campus on my walk home from lab, never watch the fog roll in in real time from my window, never wander down the jetty shivering because I forgot a jacket again. So it’s different. More precious, I think. That’s quite enough catastrophizing for now, there’s still three weeks left! In terms of science, this week was fairly standard. Just before Dr. Galloway departed for a diving trip last week he gave me access to a new collection of diving footage. These videos were taken locally at Cape Arago last year, and this week I analyzed all twenty for kelp density. I was surprised that I managed to do almost double the amount of work I did for the last set of videos but I suppose I was feeling productive. Next week I’ll work on making figures from the new data and perhaps look into a comparison between the two data sets. In a personal turn of events, I went home last weekend. My mother’s birthday party was on Saturday, so on impulse I flew home with Flynn and Ytxzae to attend. I should mention “home” for me is Sunnyvale, CA. While we were there we visited San Francisco and explored for a while. The Golden Gate Bridge was as cherry-red as always and the wind was as obnoxious as I remember. Seeing my family for a few days was truly lovely. On Sunday we drove back up to Oregon and passed through the redwoods in Humboldt and the coast just beyond them. The whole thing was gorgeous and mind-numbing and memorable to say the least.
I think that’s all for now. |
AuthorHello! My name is Catalina, welcome to my blog! I am a rising Junior at NYU pursuing a degree in Biology and I'm from Sunnyvale, California. This summer I am working in Dr. Aaron Galloway's Coastal Trophic Ecology (CTE) lab developing video survey methodology applied to kelp forest monitoring. Thanks for reading! Archives
August 2022
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