Goals for Summer 2020

The goals I have set myself for the summer include getting extremely acquainted with working in an online environment, dependently and independently; become well-versed in the use of R/R Studio for statistical analysis, creating plots and graphs, and programming scripts to aggregate data from sets; gain knowledge and experience about various projects/topics while working in an multi-faceted oceanographic research lab; and meet and establish relationships with professors, researchers, and project leaders that are within my field of oceanography. Even if I am unable to fulfill all of the goals I have set for this summer, some of those listed I plan on working toward as long-term goals as well. What I hope to learn while working with my internship is the ins and outs of how research laboratories function, how abstracts develop into full manuscripts, and how to create statistical analysis scripts and functions for plotting/mapping data.

Over the course of this internship this summer, I hope to develop a few skills I believe will be beneficial for my possible career in research. I hope to improve on my independent work ethic given I will be doing much of work independently at first. I hope to further develop my communication skills via online interaction, especially with much of the work done likely to continue to be online through the near future.

This internship will help further my goals by allowing myself to gain needed and valuable research and program experience which I can utilize in future endeavors within oceanography field. I will be working on data analysis of deep-sea jellyfish using R Studio over the course, which in turn will help me expand my program experience. Lastly, through meeting and speaking to multiple people from the lab and those adjacent to the lab, I will be able to increase my network of known individuals within my discipline.

Covid-19 Reflection

COVID-19 has drastically turned “business as usual” on its head and given us space to reevaluate a multitude of human practices. Presently, this large-scale adjustment to social practices has affected all of the plans I had initially made for this summer. My original plans started with me remaining in Santa Cruz, CA from spring quarter into summer quarter. I was also looking into changing my housing. I had intended to take a handful of classes, mostly laboratories and general education classes, to round out my academic year. After those classes, my family and I had planned out an international trip to South Africa to visit a close family friend who was intending to study abroad there for a journalism program. My more personal goals for the summer included getting back into a more fit *shape* to get better and more comfortable with surfing again, and to return to Hawai’ian outrigger canoeing (which is a traditional Polynesian open ocean sport) and visiting my old teammates given the opportunity to see them.

The adaptations I made to those initial plans of course are vast in comparison. Instead of going through with what I had initially intended to do, the changes began with me moving back to southern California within in three days of learning campus was closing and classes were transitioning online for the foreseeable future. I finished up spring quarter in quarantine and searched for housing in Santa Cruz for fall quarter, whether online or not. During this time I also enrolled in online summer courses, but while waiting for classes to start, I applied to the GEOPATHS program to be a remote intern as a second option in case I decided more online classes was not for me. Fortunately and unexpectedly, I was accepted as an intern this summer at Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) and did drop the classes I initially intended to take. Also, rather unexpectedly, I found housing in Bonny Doon, CA after my months long search to find new housing after the pandemic hit the United States at full swing. Currently, I have moved back to Santa Cruz county to participate in my MBARI remote internship and for the academic year, albeit most of the year will be online rather than in person.

GeoScience Career Panel Reflection

Thinking back to last Friday’s career panel, I felt the career stories that resonated with me the most were Rikke Jeppesen and Kyle Broach. Starting with Rikke Jeppesen’s story, I felt her story about her career path was the most circular but the most rewarding and fulfilling way to result in studying estuaries. I thought the amount of different and unique experiences she gained before finding a career path that was comfortable and interesting made her a very well-rounded individual who was capable of understanding the jobs most consider negatively or look down upon. Having worked in what some would consider “demeaning” job gave her a significantly higher empathy than those who took a more step by step approach in their career, and I consider that to be one of the more important traits to hold on to in academia. What surprised me about Rikke Jeppesen’s story was just how long of path she took to come to where she is, but I also appreciate the length of her career path because of the amazing journey she told us all about.

In terms of Kyle Broach’s career story, I felt that he gave very good insight into what a data scientist looks like nowadays and spoke about how he didn’t exactly go step by step in his path either. What surprised me about his story in particular was how many different coding languages and programs he was utilizing in his research and work. Recently, I have been looking into pursuing data science though myself not having realized or acknowledged the amount of computer science that goes with it. After being a part of this internship program for five weeks now and learning and using a new coding language, I have realized I am more serious about pursuing something within the data science field than I was before.

I would love to learn more about how to apply to international graduate programs and the differences of requirements between applying in N. America versus another continent/country. The career panel has made me reconsider my original outlook on my personal post-graduation plans of going straight into a graduate degree. I have started putting significant thought into having a gap year between the end and start of my degrees and what I would do with a full year to myself. It has been weird considering stopping attending school after 15 straight years of academia on varied levels, but I think it is a well-deserved break. I just have to wait until my senior year to start seriously planning anything out.

Final Reflection

My original goals for this summer were becoming more acquainted with working in an online environment (dependently and independently); becoming well-versed in R language for statistical analysis; gain knowledge from various projects/topics while working in an multi-faceted oceanographic research lab; and establish relationships with professors and researchers that are within my field of oceanography. Throughout my time as a part of this internship program, I can confidently say I have met all of the goals I set for myself in the beginning. I will also mention I normally end up meeting half or less of the goals I set for myself due to them generally having multiple steps. But with my wonderful experience this summer, I can say I surpassed my own expectations. One of the things I wish I had known in the beginning of my internship was how many hours I would spend coding, though I think I should have expected it with a data science internship program.

For my first goal, having spent roughly 10 weeks almost attached to my laptop and working independently has definitely led me to be much more comfortable working in an online environment. The same can be said about my goal for becoming more well-versed in R language. The significant amount of time I have spent learning, executing, and researching various R error codes, functions, and packages has made me so much more comfortable to produce useful visual analysis. As for my final two goals, they ended up going hand in hand in terms of execution; it was through speaking with and getting to know all of the mentors I have had throughout the program on the lab and MBARI side of my experience. Through my weekly laboratory meetings, I got to learn about all of the different projects currently in the works, about the manuscripts, upcoming talks/presentations, and research cruises that were all happening at the same time.

In regard to my research, I feel very successful in the outcomes of my project. Not only have I submitted an abstract for a future poster presentation with AGU, I presented my preliminary findings during the MBARI internship symposium for my first given talk. I feel more than accomplished with all that I have done this past summer; I feel as I have done more productive things with my time than with my original summer plans especially with the current pandemic limiting so much with what we can do right now.

I spent my time as part of this online internship program working on the largely self-directed Jellywatch project. This particular project is focused specifically on using community-sourced science as the primary dataset from the Jellywatch.org website to explore on-shore sightings of Velella jellyfish. Working together with my mentor, Steve Haddock, we focused on exploring the physical drivers behind Velella jellyfish wash-ups. Velella are blue colored hydroid polyps with a clear vertical stiff sail that floats atop the ocean’s surface and are dependent on the wind and ocean currents for all travel. Spring seasonal storms over the ocean results in large “wash-ups” on coasts globally.

The project’s goals were to use community sourced science as the primary datasets to discover correlations between wind vector data and Velella on-shore sightings; to find distribution patterns among the location and dates of on-shore sightings; and to use the R coding language for all of the graphical and visual analysis of the datasets. Alongside the Jellywatch.org data, we supplemented the data with another community-sourced science dataset, iNaturalist.org, Velella and Physalia (Man ‘o War) sightings, which added more depth to our analysis due to its larger size and almost opposite sighting patterns. Then I looked at Planet.com satellite data to corroborate the larger Velella “wash-ups” from Jellywatch.org and iNaturalist.org. The location we focused on for the wind vector data came from a sensor at MBARI that recorded the direction, speed, and time of the current wind currents. This extremely sizable dataset made it possible to discover correlations between the prevailing wind currents and the onshore sightings of Velella.

I began my analysis of the Velella onshore sightings through creating a global map projection with layers plotted over the coastlines showing the correct locations of sightings through the given coordinate data. This portion of the visual analysis took the most amount of time to flush out due to a rather steep learning curve of using multiple R packages I was unfamiliar with alongside getting back into the R language after some time. Next, I took the global map projections and created multiple that only plotted the data by year which demonstrated the significant increase in user data in the year following the brief pause in the Jellywatch.org website. The results of this visual analysis indicated global distribution of Velella sightings, most predominantly found along the United States (US) west coast and around the United Kingdom. One interesting result indicated almost out of phase sightings between the Velella and Physalia along the coasts of the US; Physalia is extremely dominate on the east coast while close to non-existent along the west coast. Then using the multiple graphs by year, I complied them into a gif file as a visually interesting way to digest the changes across the datasets.

Following the creation of the global maps, I did graphical analysis of the Jellywatch.org and iNaturalist.org datasets to find correlation between the seasons and when the highest frequency of “wash-ups” occurred. The results indicated Velella show seasonality in their onshore sightings, specifically the highest frequency of their sightings occur in the spring months independent of hemisphere. Physalia on the other hand shows an out of phase relationship to the Velella sighting seasonality, primarily found onshore during the fall months. I then combined all three datasets of both polyp species to layer their unique global distribution to make a more direct comparison of their sightings. This global map plot showed the significant difference in the number of sightings of Physalia versus Velella, where Physalia are spotted, Velella are unlikely to be seen there. Finally, I created a density line graph to demonstrate the increase of community science data entries in the last decade meant to show the growing interest and usability of crowd-sourced data. Overall, I feel significantly fulfilled and proud of what I have accomplished with my time a part of the GEOPATHS and MBARI programs.