In January of 2022, I started my journey into Marine Science at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, South Carolina. Commuting 1.5 hours one-way every day, I knew it would be a difficult experience but one where I knew it was worth the exhausted days and stressful nights of studying. While pursuing my degree, I have been part of a lab studying North Atlantic right whales and how public perception influences policy creation and implementation. I am just over a year and half through my undergraduate degree (hopefully graduating in the spring of 2025), and am so happy I decided to go back to school. I am 29, have been married five and a half years, and never once thought I would go back to school. I never thought I could afford it, or that I would have the time. My husband encouraged me to go back to school as well, which greatly helped in my making the jump. Halfway through my first semester, sitting in classes learning about evolutionary adaptations, the chemistry of the deep sea and more, I found myself wondering how I would ever be able to compete with others in the field later in life when it came time for me to start my career. I thought I would never find an internship or would be chosen because of my age. It turns out I just needed to find the right one.
In the fall of 2022, while on Instagram, I looked at the story of my department's Undergraduate Director and noticed an amazing-sounding internship opportunity that was offered through NOAA. I immediately called my husband and expressed my excitement, but then stopped myself and said I could never do something like that- be gone for ten weeks away from him, the pets, the house. At that point, I had never lived in a dorm, let alone by myself. He immediately told me I had to apply for it, and I did!
In the application process, you need to have a letter of recommendation from someone at your university, and someone else who knows you well. You also need to provide your transcript and are given the option of listing which opportunities within the internship you are most interested in participating in.
Some of the projects for 2023 include:
Finding Ecosystem and Biodiversity Hotspots
Understanding Economic and Social Dynamics of Fishing Communities
Applied Kelp Aquaculture
Bycatch Reduction Engineering Program Project
Bay Scallops and Ocean Acidification
Using Satellite Remote Sensing for Ecological Studies
Studying Endangered Atlantic Salmon
Stakeholder Support for International Programs (that's me!)
Shortfin Squid Electronic Size Monitoring Project
The benefits of the internship include an ecosystem dynamics and complex systems course that counts for 2 hours of college credits, an introduction to R/R Studio, bonding with the others in your cohort and making life-long connections, experiencing real-world research, meeting people from various parts of NOAA while building a network of people you may be able to work with in the future, and a $5,000 stipend. The program also covers travel, food, and lodging apart from the stipend. To enroll, you must be an undergraduate student.
The program is ten weeks long, but is split into two different parts. The first two weeks of the program are at Monmouth University as you sit through lessons on ecosystems and how everything in the environment is part of one large system. The lessons/class time were in the first half of the day, and in the second half we took vans down to the Sandy Hook lab and would do different things each day, one of which was visiting the New Jersey Sea Grant office where we had the ability to take a seine net into the water, see what the local fish population was like, went through sediment, and participated in a beach cleanup. Over the course of the two weeks, we met many people from NOAA who worked in the regional offices or labs and were able to talk to them about their experiences.
The first two weeks was a great opportunity to meet other students who are in similar fields with you, going through like experiences, but for the most part who all come from different backgrounds. There were eighteen of us and about that many universities represented as well. The latter eight weeks was spent sitting in on meetings, being brought in on multiple projects, and meeting as many people as I could from different offices or backgrounds to see how they got there. In the eight weeks we worked hands-on in labs or in office settings, collecting data or working on projects in our offices with others. At the end of the eight weeks we will present either on August 10th or 11th, to anyone in NOAA who would like to take part.
I plan on pursuing graduate school, but I am always torn between cubicle work and field work. I have been able to pick the brains of highly intelligent people at headquarters and let them know my dilemma. They have been quick to make me feel like that's a perfectly normal feeling. I chose to go back to school to work with animals firsthand, and I want to stay true to that, but also want to help make sure policy creation and implementation is happening. I hope to do NOAA proud with my final presentation from what I have worked on during my internship on either the 10th or 11th of August, and am hoping I will have the opportunity to present my project at my very first conference in October in Portland, Oregon through SACNAS.
What I hope you all get out of this post, even if you don't plan on pursuing marine science or similar, is that even though you may feel like you can't pursue a dream, people are there to support and help you. If you truly care about it, you will make a way to pursue it. Staying stagnant in a thought process will get you no where. To make changes happen in your life, you have to make a jump and do the scary thing.
For anyone interested in talking with me more about this internship other than what I have above, please feel free to contact me.
Go make waves!
-Hunter