Last PostFinal Week: Goodbye Charleston Today is Friday which means that tomorrow we all leave back to our regular lives. Some of us will be going to the airport in the morning and then rest will drive back in their cars. All I can say about the summer is that I think this will go down as the best summer of my life so far and I had such a great experience meeting new friends and doing research with some of the smartest and coolest people I have met. I want to thank Avery, Lauren, and Caitlin for aiding me throughout the whole summer on my project and being amazing figures to look up to. I want to obviously thank Dr. Craig Young for allowing me to do such a great project and giving me the resources I needed to do the best I could have. Shout out to Flynn for being a great lab partner and always fitting in some laughs in the middle of our intense work day. I feel like I had a great time getting to know all the REU interns and we all had similar yet different experiences we are leaving with. I hope they all continue doing well in life and remember all the fun memories we shared throughout the 9 weeks here. The week went by slow which felt good because we leave tomorrow and it is very bitter sweet. I tried to take advantage of any opportunity to have fun and to learn. Going to UO main campus to work on TEM with the grad students and Flynn was a really fun time and I finally got to see Hayward Field !! The poster presentation is now over and I am very proud of my work and everyone elses. You can tell by just looking at their posters how much time and effort was put into their posters and how they basically became experts in their subject. I hope to keep in touch with everyone and all in all a great summer at OIMB! Time to kick back at Richards pot luck and share our last memory here on the Oregon Coast! I got asked today a few times “Whats next for you?” And I think whats next is that I will be attending a new University at UCSC and I will be embarking in a new journey and will be meeting tons of new people. I hope that this REU reflects well on my knowledge of marine sciences and helps be get more opportunities in the Earth Science department at UCSC.
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PosterThe week was spent finishing up imaging and working on my poster for the symposium next Friday! I felt pretty good about my poster and have spent full days dedicated to working on the outline and the format of the poster. I have messed around with slightly different formats and I think the one I landed on now works the best. I used Adobe Photoshop and ImageJ to crop and label my SEM images and add scale bars. This wasn't a hard task but it was pretty time consuming. We presented our posters to the other REU interns and Richard/Maya to receive critiques and ideas on how to better the poster. I took everything that was mentioned and tried to add it to the poster! I spent the ladder part of the week tweaking the images and making sure everything is symmetrical and flows. Thanks to the grad students and Flynn, I have people to bounce ideas off of and see what works and is better for the viewer. Slough field tripOn Thursday, Sebastian and Colleen invited me to a quick trip to their mentors house to collect a sediment core sample in the South Slough. An Earth Science professor from OSU came down and we walked from Shawns house down to the muddy area to get a sediment core sample to hopefully see a visual change in sediment from a tsunami that occurred in the 1700s. This could be seen in the core by a quick change in sediment texture and size. We took 100 cm sediment core and actually saw the change in sediment which indicated that there was a huge tsunami back in the 1700s. We then walked back to the house and took the core to the South Slough lab to freeze. WeekendOn Friday after dinner we had a little bonfire at OIMB beach with the UO students since it was most of their last night at OIMB for the summer. I feel like I have became good friends with most of them so it was fun to enjoy the open ocean and the beautiful sunset. We spend the rest of the night chatting in the dining hall until 12 am and shared fun memories and jokes. Saturday was quite fun since we had a crab boil with some South Slough interns at their house up the mountain. We had two 5 gallon buckets of green crabs filled up and spent about an hour cleaning and getting them ready for the boil. The stove at the house was not the strongest and took a while to get the water hot enough to put the crabs in. We added about half a bucket of crab, corn, potatoes, shrimp, and sausage. We finally decided that the crab was cooked and had a grand feast. The potatoes never really cooked but oh well. We enjoyed the night with some drinks and some singing while an intern played the guitar.
Last couple SEMsAS the week went on, I finished prepping my last couple samples and got them ready for SEM. I spent the las two lab days of the week working on SEM for about 6 hours each day. I got some good images and was able to collect enough variation for my project and for the CMLC presentation on the weekend. I ran into a small problem with the SEM machine because it would unfocus and focus while taking images so it was not usable. I had to take a few pictures of the same stubs many times just to get a fully focused one which wasted some time since it takes ~5 minutes to take one image. On Friday, I finished up taking images and organized them on the library computers. For next week I will work on the images on photoshop and get them ready for the poster. The CMLC presentation was a success and really fun. Flynn and I got together a bunch of stuff to show the community. We had Alvinaconcha shells, Ifremeria shells, a photo slide of the SEM images and of the Hydrothermal vents, and some actual Warens larvae that I put under a microscope for people to see. Weekend!After the CMLC presentation, Sebastian and Colleen had live European Green Crabs for their presentation. I asked if I could have them so I can cook them up. They gave me a bucket with about 8 crabs and I cooked them up in the Inverts dorm. I just boiled them in some spices and added them to a pot with a garlic lemon butter sauce. They ended up being pretty good and about 5 of us sat down and ate them together. Sunday was a nice relaxing day as I took it as a personal day to go hike and explore. I started the day by walking to Bastendorff beach at noon and read/sun bathed for an hour or so. I then walked over to the big jetty and sat down and listened to music. I noticed the beach with the train tunnel so I tried to go but the tide was too high. I saw a path that lead up the cliff and I ended up at the top of the cliff. I crawled through some bushes and found myself on the backside of some plot of land with some abandoned buildings. I continued by journey by following a dirt backroad that ended at a round about. I looked on google maps and saw that. I was near a main road and just had to bushwack through about 100 meters of thick forest. I ended up getting stuck in a Blackberry patch which sucked because they have a lot of thorns. I pushed through and finally found the road after some sketchy situations. I was relieved and went straight back to OIMB. I jumped in the water and enjoyed the sun while it was still out. Overall a fun experience but was pretty scary when I was deep in the thick woods with blackberry thorns all over me haha. Weekend TripOn Friday Flynn, Catalina, and I flew out of the North Bend airport to SFO and got there around 3:30 in the afternoon. Catalinas mom picked us up and took us to cool parts of San Fransisco that I have been meaning to go. We went straight to Haight street where we walked around and hit some cool little stores. After this we went to the Wharf and got some sourdough bread. Catalinas mom arranged tickets for a boat tour around the Golden Gate Bridge and around Alcatraz Island. We ended the night eating some dinner at a restaurant and drove to Cats house in Cupertino. Saturday was spent hitting coffee shops, bagel shops and boba shops. Us three bartended for Cats moms birthday party and finished off the night with a late night In n Out run! Road Trip!That Sunday, We drove back to OIMB which took us about 10 hours. It was nice driving up California since that was all uncharted territory for me. I was amazed to how dense the woods are in Northern California and beautiful the scenery is. We got to OIMB at about 8 PM and just showered and relaxed after a long day. SEMMy SEM images are coming along well and I have greatly increased my image taking skills. I have learned how to use the Black/Gain mode on the SEM which intensified the Blacks and creates a contrast between the larva and the golden stub. This makes it easier to visualize the cilia on the larva. I have been taking more and more images in order to create a developmental "timeline" of the different warens stages for my project poster. I have also gotten a decent start to the poster and I have an idea of how the layout will be along with my results. The weeks are going by fast and we only have ~10 more working lab days which is not a long time to finish everything up. Excited to see how my poster turns out and how I will present my information.
This upcoming Saturday we also present at the CMLC to high schoolers and the public. This would be fun because we will get the change to present out project to a broad range of people and hopefully present to people who are very interested. |
AuthorHello I am Ytxzae Enriquez I am originally from Las Vegas, NV but have been living in Santa Barbara for a while. I just graduated from SBCC with two AAs in Biology. By the end of my career at Santa Barbara City College (SBCC) I really got into the Earth Sciences and I will transfer to University of California: Santa Cruz (UCSC) this Fall as an Earth Science/Ocean Science B.S Major. I really enjoy Surfing, Rock Climbing, Skateboarding, and going on super sick hikes. Archives
August 2022
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