having fun and doing scientific research

Post date: Aug 9, 2013 5:48:44 PM

The Stanford Earth Sciences internship has come and gone. These eight weeks have certainly gone by rapidly, but even in that timespan, I learned many things about biology and the fossil record, all while having fun and doing scientific research. I have met many people at this internship, and I will miss them all.

Near the end of this program, I completed my ostracod volumes. These were very tedious and required me to record the size, species name, period, place found, etc. of all the ostracods in a volume. I finished two volumes (about 650 species). I also finished working on my AGU project, which involves finding the relationship between ostracod size and the amount of biomass in oil wells. We discovered that there was a very significant correlation between the two (the p-value was less than 10^-14), and we will present our information at the AGU meeting in December.

On the last day of our internship, we presented our final projects. The first ones to present were the General Program interns. Some of their projects were very intriguing, such as Jared’s beryllium dating of rocks. After these presentations, we had pizza, played Mafia, and went over to view our posters. (I presented my poster on an earlier day with my partners, Aditya and Amogh.) Our posters were very well developed and aesthetically beautiful, and all of our projects were very interesting.

This internship was very interesting and informative, and a very good opportunity to perform some scientific research. It was a very good experience overall, and I look forward to coming back next year, if possible.