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.
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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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