Post date: Jul 12, 2012 12:27:04 AM
I thinks it is an enlightenment opportunity. I am learning and gaining new knowledge everyday, and had met many people from various states across the United States who have came to research at the paleobiology lab. My supervisors are Gus and Jon. Gus is calm and informative. He is very nice. Once when he took me to the library in the Mitchell Bldg to get a new set of books to work on, he tried to start a conversation with me so he would get to know me more. I appreciate how he put an effort into getting to know me more, because I do not open up easily to strangers so I had not made friends with many people at the lab at that time. Jon is also nice. I rarely speak to him, but I can see that he is. From what I heard from others, he seems to be a man dedicated to his research. He gave the interns a tour in Stanford's fossils room, and I was very interested in the fossils there. There were fossils of corals, gastropods, foraminiferas, as well as a large skeleton structure of a lion. There was also an imprint of a dinosaur's footprint.
Gus and Jon assigned me to be part of the process of checking the measurements of foraminiferas. I have gone through about 3 volumes (each consisting of 2 books), and is now on my fourth one. All I have to do is check the measurements made by another intern/researcher, and correct his/her mistakes. I think foraminiferas are unique. Jon told me that they are microscopic, and from what I observed as I was doing the checking, they truly are. There are many that are less than 1 mm. I heard from Mayra, another intern and also my friend, that one interesting trend observed in the foraminiferas is that their sizes increase in response to the increases in carbon in the environment. At the lab, researchers and interns are trying to answer the question on what affects body sizes. Perhaps for the foraminiferas, the factor is carbon. I hopes to have more information by the end of this internship to help me understand further more the factors that affect body sizes.
http://ngocinternshipexperience.blogspot.com/2012/07/first-post-my-experience-at.html