Post date: Aug 1, 2013 12:34:23 AM
These past few weeks have been very interesting, to say the least. They certainly have been more exciting than the first few weeks; although the first weeks were very fun too, in their own way. Daily football games and magic tricks help to break the routine.
We have been measuring ostracods for pretty much the entire duration of this internship. It can get pretty monotonous at times, especially when the fossils all look alike. However, we were able to start our own projects a couple weeks ago, which provided a welcome change in routine. Now, we all spend several hours each day working on our individual projects. It's interesting to see how the effort we put into measuring all the fossils paid off by providing us with data to use for projects.
Working on projects takes a lot of concentration and effort, but it's really interesting too. We had to learn a programming language called R in order to create the graphs and do the calculations needed to support our experiment. We also got a ton of help from Noel and Jon; they gave us really great advice on what to do next and how to do it. As we are wrapping up our project, we are starting to work on the poster that will (hopefully) clearly explain what we did this summer.
Our original project's focus was to determine how various factors that influence echinoderm body size affect each other, and to also possibly discover new factors that influence body size. However, in our search to find the answers to our question, we discovered interesting trends that we didn't set out to find. Despite the dead-ends we frequently ran into, we were eventually able to answer all our questions and form a coherent conclusion. One of the best things about this whole experience is the knowledge that you are the first to discover whatever you discover; no one has ever created the graphs you create or observed the trends that you see.
I also enjoyed the field trips to the art museum, Hayward Fault, and the dry creek bed. The art-museum tour was surprisingly interesting because the docent could explain the history and the thought that went into each work. The best part of the Hayward Fault tour was visiting Memorial Stadium, and also learning how humans had engineered the building to stay upright even though the fault ran right through it. At the creek bed, we learned about the geologic processes that had shaped the creek, and ate blackberries that probably weren't poisonous, which was fun.
So far, this internship has been really fun, and I hope our final project will turn out well!