Internships launch careers

May 21, 2012

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This past week my parents and I attended my younger brother’s college graduation in Chicago. While we were very proud of him for finishing his degree in film production, we were also celebrating the fact that he’d already taken the next step.

Kevin took part in an internship for school credit during his final semester, doing film and print media for a Chicago-based hospitality company. He worked hard throughout, I’m told, going above and beyond, and impressing his would-be employers with the skills he amassed during his years in college. So when it came time for the internship to end they brought him on full time. The ink was barely dry on his new contract by the time my family arrived for graduation.

During the ceremony, the valedictorian of my brother’s class told his fellow students that each one of them is the “protagonist of their own film,” drawing on the process of screenwriting for an analogy. He likened their collegiate years to the life that a screenwriter must invent for their protagonist before writing a script—establishing their personal histories, as well as their wants and desires, strengths and weaknesses. Then, he went on, at the end of college is where the movie begins.

While I liked the speech a lot, I disagreed with him on this final point. I don’t think it’s enough to worry only about getting good grades, college is also a time to build your hands-on skills and personal contacts. Through a job, internship or volunteer position you can get your foot in the door and show a would-be employers that you not only have book smarts, but that you’re also a hard worker.

In the context of science, research experience in college or even high school is critical for getting into graduate school or going directly into a job. So here are a few of the many ways to gain experience:

Natural resource management: Walking beaches to monitor the nests of rare birds, tagging wild animals and removing invasive species are just a few of the great outdoor activities of a natural resource manager. My best friend spent his college summers getting paid to do just that on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean in Massachusetts and New Jersey, and the expertise he built landed him a job with the state of Vermont after graduation. Click here and here for two natural resource management job boards.

Internship programs: A number of programs connect undergrads with scientists at universities, and many of them even pay students for their time. One such program is funded by the national government and is called Research Experienced for Undergraduates. Click here to see the wide range of disciplines and find a site near you.

Working in a lab for school credit of as a volunteer: Labs at universities and private institutions are always looking for volunteers to help with research. Often these opportunities aren’t advertised widely, so if you come across an interesting research topic or hear about a lab doing exciting work then look them up on the internet. A short email introduction can often lead to volunteer position, and be sure to try a few possibilities until one sticks.

Volunteering at aquarium or zoo: Zoos and aquariums rely heavily on volunteers for everything from taking care of animals to educating visitors. Volunteers can be a wide range of ages and both high school and college students are welcome. My girlfriend used to work at an aquarium and told me that they often hired their best volunteers when paid positions opened up. Click here to find out how to apply to be a volunteer at Birch Aquarium here in San Diego.

This list offers just a few suggestions for avenues to look down for hands-on research and outreach experience. Each one offers the chance to impress potential employers, all the while giving you a first-hand look at a potential career.

Mentors play critical role

May 13, 2012

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One of the lesser-known facts about grad school is that much of what we learn doesn’t necessarily come from professors or reading scientific papers. While both are critical to our education, other grad students also provide a wealth of information and support.

During my first year at Scripps I was required to jump into a research project. I hadn’t chosen adissertation topic, but I knew that I wanted to continue to mix biology, chemistry and geology as I had done in undergrad. It wasn’t long before I realized that corals suited my interests well, being that they’re an animal, “plant” and rock all wrapped in one.

This led me to another grad student named Jessica Carilli who was using geology and chemistry to study how corals react to changes in their environment. To conduct her research Jess was examining skeleton cores that she’d collected from boulder-shaped corals in Belize and Honduras.

Similar to a tree, corals grow a new band of skeleton each year. But the skeleton records much more than just the corals’ age. By measuring element concentrations and taking X-rays of the cores, Jess determined the temperature of the sea, the level of metal pollutants, and how frequently severe bleaching had occurred throughout the lifetime of individual colonies.

When we met, Jess was nearing the end of her dissertation and her only regret was that there just wasn’t enough time to ask the many questions that her cores could potentially answer. So after hearing about my interests, she was excited to take me under her wing and learn more from her samples.

Jess taught me how to make elemental measurements and helped me interpret my findings. She had also collected some complimentary data, and when we put it all together the project got much stronger. At the end of my first year I wrote about our joint work in a paper, along with the help of a few other researchers, and it became the first chapter of my dissertation.

Three years later, I found myself deep into my primary dissertation work in Curaçao. While I enjoyed my first year project, I had since become excited about reef ecology, and in particular, how the health of baby corals influences future generations. To investigate my new research topic I had turned to a different technique: measuring fats in coral to see how much energy they store in their tissue.

Meanwhile, Jess had graduated and taken up a postdoc position in Australia. There, she and collaborator Simon Donner of the University of British Columbia, were looking for bleaching events in skeletal cores collected from corals in the Pacific. In addition to looking into each coral’s past using techniques from Jess’ dissertation, they wanted to know the current health of the animals. To do this they turned to fat measurements, and because of the work I was already doing they turned to me.

The gist of what we found—combining all three of our areas of expertise—is that when the sea heats up, corals used to living in places where the temperature varies a lot bleach less than those used to a constant-temperature ocean, presumably because they’re better at tolerating high temperatures.

All in all, my relationship with Jess has gone from mentor to collaborator. As is the case throughout the world of science, we’ve figured out how to draw on each other’s now different skills, utilizing our individual strengths in order to solve nature’s puzzles.

Dissertation comes slowly into focus

April 30, 2012

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Friends and family often ask me what it means to be a Ph.D. student. Some wonder if it’s just more years of classes, while others think it involves a lot of teaching. While both are part of it, a Ph.D. is at its core all about our research.

At the end of five, six or even seven years of grad school, all of our research goes into a dissertation. The document can be more than 100 pages in length and is broken up into chapters, each detailing individual projects that we conducted. In the end, the quality of our dissertation is used to decide whether we’ve achieved the knowledge necessary to be called a “Dr.”

When I started grad school, I had little idea what my dissertation topic would be. I had many interests: microbial geochemistry, tropical aquaculture, and coastal pollution, along with a background in biology. But none of the topics excited me enough on their own, nor were they easy to connect.

Thankfully, my mind was put to ease from the get-go. Before I even applied to Scripps a professor here gave me some great advice: Don’t come into grad school thinking you’ve got your topic figured out. There are things that you will learn here that you didn’t know existed.

He was essentially saying that grad school is a process of intellectual growth—your knowledge will grow, and your dissertation will come into focus and continuously improve as you learn new things.

In my first year at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, I helped on a project looking at pollutants in Venice lagoon sediments (Italy that is), and then studied skeletal isotopes in corals collected from small islands in the Caribbean.

Both of these projects utilized my background in geochemistry and I liked the opportunity to dig my hands into familiar territory. But I wasn’t getting my hands dirty enough. While I was studying samples that came from incredible places, I wasn’t the one out there designing the research and working in the field.

My first opportunity to visit Curaçao came in my second year. While there I assisted with on-going projects and performed small experiments of my own. My early research question was somewhat rudimentary: how do coral babies react to fertilizer? But as I kept going back to the island, trying new things and asking new questions, my work became more refined.

The health of baby coral piqued my interest and I began throwing ideas around with my colleagues on the island and at Scripps. I wondered whether healthy adult corals make health babies, and whether health babies are better able to tolerate polluted environments. As my excitement, knowledge and experience grew, my dissertation topic came into focus.

Many professors I’ve spoken with lament the fact that some students enter grad school highly focused on one area of research, but they also fear the student who jumps from project to project. From my experience, it seem that there are no true rules for picking a topic—be it a senior or masters thesis, or a Ph.D. dissertation. It’s really about keeping an open mind, finding something that interests you, and seeing it through to the end.

Marine biologist stays dry

April 30, 2012

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I’m a tropical marine biologist but I don’t SCUBA dive. Sound crazy?

While true, it’s not the whole story. I am not allowed to SCUBA dive. Knowing my medical history of heart and lung issues my doctors think it’s too risky. But even when I take the time to explain this to people, some still scoff.

“Aaron, how do you think you can work with corals if you can’t dive? I just don’t understand,” a professor from another university once asked.

“You don’t dive?” A tourist once exclaimed while in Curaçao on a dive vacation. “That makes no sense,” she laughed. “What are you thinking?”

While their comments stung, I’ve learned to smirk them away because I can confidently tell them: I make it work, and it’s not even that hard.

Their questions are practical, I suppose—the animals I study live in water that’s at least ten feet deep, so I can’t very well collect them or run experiments in their natural habitat. But my naysayers forget one key thing: science is collaborative; I don’t have to be the one dropping below the surface.

To get past my limitation I’ve linked up with two highly skilled SCUBA diving scientists, Kristen Marhaver and Mark Vermeij, who make the collections necessary for me to do my work—or better said: to do our work.

Conducting research as a group is the norm, not the exception. When people bring different expertise and ideas together the outcome can be bigger than the sum of the parts. In other words, cool things happen.

While it’s rare for a team member to be medically barred from completing part of a project, it’s common for individuals to have certain skills and lack others. That’s the whole point of working together, and this is true in just about every field of science.

Kristen and Mark are much more than expert divers, they’re coral reef ecologists. Through sharing their expertise with me, the three of us have discovered some really interesting things about what make corals tick. But our work wouldn’t be possible if I didn’t contribute.

At the field station in Curaçao I set up complex aquarium systems, collect and rear baby corals, run experiments and take samples. I then process the samples and analyze data back in San Diego. While Kristen and Mark taught me some of the techniques we use, many others I’ve learned, practiced and developed on my own.

Looking back, I wouldn’t say that I had an unusually large amount of determination or perseverance, I just believed in what I was doing and wanted to keep doing it.

Many of us have experienced someone telling us that we aren’t capable of something. Just like how I was told to forget marine biology, people may have said you can’t do something because you’re a girl, a boy, a C student, too short, too tall, and on and on.

What matters is how you respond. And I don’t mean in that moment—my encounters with naysayers left me angry and venting to friends afterward—I mean in the long-term. I could have let their comments get to me and turned away from studying corals, but I didn’t.

In many ways I was lucky to link up with Mark and Kristen: they’re great at what they do and welcomed me in as mentors and friends. But none of it would have happened had I not first proved myself as a scientist and hard worker. They didn’t offer me the opportunity on a whim, I had to work hard to build our collaboration, excelling at what I could do and accepting what I couldn’t.

How I became a marine biologist

April 30, 2012

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One of the most common questions students ask me is how I became a marine biologist. This week I focus on five lessons drawn from my own experiences.

1) Do what’s fun. If what you are doing is not fun, find something you like more.

I had a number of surgeries as a teenager, and my understanding of what patients feel lead me to believe that I’d make a good doctor. So, in high school I shadowed a brain surgery team and during college I worked as a research assistant studying multiple sclerosis. While I liked that the research benefited people, I felt confined by the lab and hospital. Eventually I realized that medicine just wasn’t for me.

As a high school or college student, many of you have the time and freedom to intern or volunteer in different work settings that seem interesting. By doing so you’ll learn what you like, as well as what you don’t. That’s valuable information to gain early when your life has some flexibility.

2) Keep an open mind.

After growing tired of medical research, I read a few books on the natural sciences. What I learned got me excited about the water cycle, leading me to email a geology professor at my school who specialized in a related topic. He had a different idea.

“Do you know about the algae bloom problem in Lake Champlain?” He asked me in our first meeting. I sure did.

I spent summers going to that very lake in northern Vermont. A few times each year I watched as large swaths of the water’s surface turned green, like split pea soup. Later I learned that the culprit was cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae, which can be toxic. Seeing an opportunity to get out of the lab while investigating a problem that hit close to home, I decided to help the professor.

As it turned out, taking algae, water and sediment samples from boats got me excited about aquatic research and I haven’t looked back. My time on the lake gave me real experience in science far beyond what I could learn from books. If I’d stuck to my guns—wanting to study the water cycle—I would have missed this fun opportunity that ultimately put me on the path to where I am today.

3) Work to become a better writer.

Unlike many, I enjoy writing. This led me to a job reporting medical discoveries in a newsletter for a cancer research institute. It was a nice change from penning lab reports for school and I enjoyed it so much that I went on to take creative writing classes in college.

Written communication is critical to being successful at most jobs, in particular those in the sciences. We have to produce research articles, and while the form is somewhat rigid, one must have strong writing abilities in order to do it well. I’m forever working to improve my scientific writing and the tools I learned in my English classes are a big help.

4) Learn new skills.

For example: statistics. This sounds boring, I know, but it’s fundamental. Stats provide the grounds on which we as scientists can say what we say, as nearly all hypotheses are formally tested using these tools. I didn’t learn enough about how to use stats during college and I’ve had to catch up. The more you learn early on, the better off you’ll be.

5) Be persistent.

No matter what I was doing, I worked hard at it. If I got to the end of a project and realized that it wasn’t for me I moved on, and if I liked it I kept going.

To get these opportunities I had to be persistent. I checked websites, sent emails and knocked on doors, much like my friend Aly. After I made contact, I provided resumes and writing samples, which I followed up with emails and calls. While you don’t want to pester a potential employer, follow-up shows that you’re serious about the job, whether it’s as a research assistant, an intern or full-time employee.

In the end, I found that grad schools professors liked my diverse resume and I saw that grades alone wouldn’t have gotten me to the next level. A range of experiences can be key to building your resume and make you a strong candidate for an advanced degree or job in any field of science.

 

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