I am in a bit of disbelief that my time here at OIMB has come to an end. This week, we scrambled to finish our posters and pack up all our stuff. I had been dreading the poster symposium all week, but we had a great turnout and it was so much fun to share my hard work. Before coming to OIMB, I did not feel confident about my ability to conduct research. I was anxious about the idea of designing my own project. Thanks to the mentorship of Kelly, Joanna, Richard, Maya, and Nicole I was able to grow so much over the course of the nine weeks. I am much more confident about abilities going forward and can't wait to see what challenges Udub will present. There are so many things I am going to miss about OIMB. Most of all, I will miss the friends I made in my short time here. I'm going to miss our late-night DQ and Taco Bell trips. I'll miss going to the library and pretending to work just so I could hang out with them. After feeling so lonely over the past year due to COVID, this experience is exactly what my heart needed, and I am so thankful to have met you guys. "How lucky am I to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard." - A.A. Milne
0 Comments
My past week has been quite busy! On Saturday we went over to the Charleston Marine Life Center and got to present our research to high school students over a zoom call. Even though we weren’t able to do our outreach in person, we all still had a lot of fun sharing our projects. Later that day we also got to attend the annual Invertebrate Ball in the OIMB dining facility. Everyone was able to dress up as their favorite invertebrate and some people got extremely creative. There were even invertebrate theme cupcakes! I spent the rest of my weekend with a few OIMB students. We are usually in the library or going on late night Dairy Queen runs to get Choco Brownie Extremes. One night we decided to grab our waders and go on an adventure to catch and release frogs in the creek behind OIMB campus. My research is complete for the most part, so most of my time has been devoted to poster creation. I am really happy with my progress so far. I learned so many cool tricks to save me literally hours of work. However, I have hit a road bump with my data analysis. I have not taken a statistics class since high school so my skills are a bit rusty. The issue that I am having is that I have multiple data sets, some of which do not follow a normal distribution pattern. This it makes it difficult to run certain statistical analyses because the data fail tests of normality and equal variance. Normally a log or square root transformation would solve this issue but I can’t find one transformation that works for every data set. My next idea is to run a non-parametric test, which I have been told works better for non-normally distributed data, but I still have a lot of reading to do. Wish me Luck!
I can't believe we've only got a few weeks left! There's been so much going on each week time has been flying by. Except for a few more trips to the docks, most of my research is now complete. I am sampling abundance throughout the water column at different times of the day. Unfortunately, this means I have to take trips to the docks at night as well. My adventures have been fruitful, but waking up in the middle of the night sure has been difficult. The interns and I have also begun to work on our posters as well. I've never made a physical poster to present my research, so I am very excited to have something to share after this is all over. Outside of my research, I've spent most of my time with other OIMB students. Last weekend we had a movie night in the library and watched the movie Robots. It's been years since I last watched that movie, and I forgot just how funny it was. We also had live music at OIMB on Sunday! A group called Three for Silver has been here at OIMB for a one-week residency working in George von Dassow's lab. They put on a concert for us students in the dining hall, and it was so much fun. Their music genre is a mashup of polychronic jazz or folk futurism, which was a new experience. I was told they construct all of their instruments, which is pretty awesome. Some of the students and I liked them so much we went out to 7 Devils brewery on Monday and watched them play again. Honestly, this whole experience has been much better than I hoped, and it's going to be hard to say goodbye to all the friends I've made here.
|
AuthorHello everyone! My name is Dominic Eastburn. I grew up in Fortuna, California. For the past two years, I have attended Green River Community College in Auburn, Washington. This fall, I am transferring to the University of Washington to pursue a BS in Oceanography. I am excited and grateful to be participating in Professor Kelly R. Sutherland's lab that focuses on the form, function, and flow of gelatinous zooplankton. Over the next nine weeks, I hope to develop valuable skills to prepare me for university and graduate school. Archives
August 2021
Categories |
Proudly powered by Weebly