PREFACE: If you are a prospective future applicant or accepted intern reading this and have any questions at all about the program from a past intern’s point of view, please feel free to reach out! My email is [email protected]. If I don’t respond after a few days, just send a follow up. So, this is it. The end of the program is here. There are so many ways I can describe my feelings about this program, but if I had to boil it down to one phrase, it would be “I’m glad I did it”. This summer allowed me to learn so many things - about estuaries, fieldwork, experimental design, the pathways in the sciences, and above all else, about myself. These past 9 weeks (10 if you count my extra week) felt both like a blink of an eye, and like an eternity at the same time. The week started off a little different than the rest. Over the weekend, all of the interns and I went over to the South Slough intern’s house for a crab boil. Since week 8 was an intensive trapping week, Colleen and I put all of the large crabs we caught to the side for eating. We had a team of us euthanizing, cleaning, and preparing crabs. We then tossed a bunch of the crabs (we had too many to eat them all), along with shrimp, sausage, corn, and potatoes in a pot for boiling. The food was fantastic (except the potatoes which unfortunately did not fully cook), and to say the night was interesting would be a vast understatement. Many laughs were had, and the view from the house was awe-inspiring. Being the final week, there wasn't much work to be done outside of Monday and Tuesday. On Monday, Colleen and I went out with Jenni, the Watershed Monitoring Coordinator at South Slough, and a High School intern Alissa for a day of field work. We went out and did some water and sediment level monitoring around the Slough. It was hard work, but Jenni is a machine at pushing through the field in any terrain. Work on Tuesday consisted solely of finishing my poster, as they were due at 3:00 pm for printing. After the finishing touches had been put on, it felt like a weight had been lifted. The program has been completed. From Tuesday to Friday, the rest of my time here was filled with packing, math studying, a trip to the dunes at Hall Lake, and a lot of reading before out poster session. I went into the session a little overly confident, and realized I had to change my approach for explaining everything that I had done. After the first or second time explaining my summer’s work, I got into a nice groove. I am proud of myself, and all of the other interns with all of the hard work that we put in. I’ll miss Oregon, my fellow interns, and all of the wonderful staff at OIMB. Until next time!
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorHey! I'm Sebastian Velazquez, a Biology (Ecology) student from Spring City, Pennsylvania. I am spending the summer studying invasive European Green Crabs under the guidance of Shon Schooler. Archives
August 2022
Categories |
Proudly powered by Weebly