Internship At NOAA
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During my junior year in high school I interned at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Southwest Fisheries Science Center, more commonly known as NOAA SWFSC. You may visit their website at https://swfsc.noaa.gov/.
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My Role at NOAA
NOAA is an organization who's mission is to generate the information necessary for the conservation and management of the region's marine resources. The Southwest Fisheries has 5 different divisions, each of which have their own subdivisions and careers. Some work in the Antarctic, some work with dissecting animals, others work with listening to them. During my time at NOAA I worked under my mentor, Annette Henry, who is a survey coordinator for the Marine Mammal and Turtle Division. My role was to ease her workload in whatever way possible. This meant everything from writing a technical memorandum, preparing an international research application for the State Department, and creating posters. I also shadowed and worked with people in different areas of NOAA to get a feel for what I liked and what I did not like in the field of marine biology.
You may find my resume here. |
Creating a Technical Memorandum
One of my major projects while at NOAA was to create a technical memorandum for a survey cruise that took place in 2014 called CalCurCEAS. CalCurCEAS stands for the California Current Cetacean Ecosystem Assessment Survey. I was given a report to edit, data to make into graphs and tables, and much more and then had the responsibility of putting it all together and formatting it. You may see my completed and published technical memorandum here.
To the right you will find one work sample from the technical memorandum that I created. That is a table of the marine species sighted during the cruise that I put together. I was given the totals and the species names then found the common names, organized it, added a description and made it look nice. This is just one of many tables that I created for the technical memorandum.
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Next you'll see one of the graphs that I created using the programs S+ and Cruzplot. This specific graph represents the blue whale sightings throughout the course of the cruise. The lines that you see were the tracklines they completed during the cruise. This is one of many graphs that I had to create.
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What I learned
My internship at NOAA was a real eye opener to me about the world around me. Slowly but surely I realized that in marine biology there are times where the job can be not so glamorous, such as when you're labeling or having to clean a fish tank, and that there will be those times for every career you may pursue. However, those not so glamorous tasks have to be completed in order for the glamorous ones to be possible. Such as with labeling; yes it will take forever and no it is not the best thing in the world however, those vials that you are labeling are making it so you can complete a lab without mistake, and that lab will allow you to find out the testosterone levels of sea turtles in a population so you can determine the sex ratio to determine wether the area is male or female bias and insure that the area doesn't become too bias in order to insure genetic diversity. It all traces back to those vials you had to label in the beginning, and I think that this is a really important piece of knowledge that I have learned.
I also learned how to create a technical memorandum, improved my skills in word and excel, learned the computer programs S+ and Cruzplot, as well as lab skills, office skills, and tons of information about marine biology and the different career path there are.
I also learned how to create a technical memorandum, improved my skills in word and excel, learned the computer programs S+ and Cruzplot, as well as lab skills, office skills, and tons of information about marine biology and the different career path there are.
Reflection
Before my internship at NOAA I knew I was highly interested in biology, but wasn't quite sure which path. I knew that medicine was something I enjoyed but wasn't positive that I wanted to go into that field, so I decided to try a marine biology internship. From my first day at NOAA I instantly fell in love with marine biology and it grew with each person I met and each new thing I learned. I still haven't quite figure out which path I want to follow, medicine or marine biology, but this experience has been a real eye opener and helped me discover a whole new field that I love.
You may see my presentation on my internship here. |