Giselle Wendt

Goals for Summer 2020

This summer I hope to learn a lot more about what working in an Earth Sciences field entails and have an informative and enjoyable time. My general goals are to complete this internship with a project that I feel proud of, and having learned and worked on my own abilities and projects that have allowed me to become a better scientist. I want to leave this internship knowing I have made a difference with something, and to have this experience open a door for me to undertake and tackle the more challenging problems in earth science.

More specifically, in terms of the development of skills, I hope to be able to increase the clarity of my writing, build new skills in the field I’m a part of, become better at time management, and be a knowledgeable member of my community of practice. In addition I hope to work past some of the troubles with virtual working, and be present in my time with this internship this summer and with the work I do. The work ethic I am hoping to develop is an overall adequate work-life balance (especially with the unique struggles working from home can bring), as currently that is one of the more difficult things for me to manage. Within that larger skill I am hoping to become better at answering emails, making my own scheduling without external check ins, setting realistic, completable goals, and having a start and end time to my day and week. In summation, I want to develop and improve the baseline skills that will allow me to tackle projects and complete things well and in a reasonable time frame.

This internship will help me develop these goals by giving me projects that will help me learn more about the field, a place to work on and develop new and important skills, and most importantly connect me with people and communities who I can ask questions and learn from.

How covid-19 changed my summer plans

GeoScience Career Panel Reflection

Personally, Scott’s story resonated with me the most! As someone who has a strong interest in a stewardship position--who’s also involved with environmental studies--I really liked hearing about Scott’s story about using science in a position that isn’t pure research, especially having the chance to don multiple hats. Ricky’s story about deciding to move to the U.S. I found really interesting, especially coming from a perspective of not following a traditional path. Scott’s story I also found engaging, having seen a lot of seasonal positions with the note that the position could be extended and not really knowing anyone who had done that. I want to know more about Ellen’s work with NASA, as I read a lot of science newsletters and find them universally engaging and really compelling narratives! More generally, while I know that life has twists and turns, it is really helpful to hear about how people’s have dealt with those twists and turns. And being able to hear about very similar narratives of conservation and environmental policy and work is a nice reminder of the similar values that people in the natural sciences hold.

Final Reflection

The first project I undertook as a part of my GEOPATHS Internship at the Coastal Resilience Lab at UCSC, a systematic literature review, focused on identifying limitations in the use of ecosystem services and valuation studies for conservation. Ecosystem services/economics is a growing field, and as payment for ecosystem services (PES) schemes and other ecosystem service programs grow there has been (theoretical) criticism that by valuing ecosystems we may exclude or de-value them as options for management. The project sought to discern if there was evidence of such limitations in ecosystem service case studies, using a systematic search and 2 case studies. As a result of my research, I wasn’t able to find a case with major perverse outcomes for the natural area, but there were many examples where the use of ecosystems was limited after it was valued economically.

In starting the literature review, I had a couple of goals that I wanted to achieve: namely developing my skills in writing clarity and time management/working solo, and overall learning more about policy work and what goes into it. My general goals were to complete this internship with a good project, to develop my skills in explaining concepts. The literature review I wrote gave me plenty of time to learn (and re-learn) all of these skills, especially answering emails, making my own scheduling without external check ins, setting realistic, completable goals, and having a start and end time to my day and week. This was a paper that I thought was out of my comfort zone, and as a result of the difficulty in writing I felt that there was definitely room for improvement. However, the nature of quarantine made progress a little more difficult, and I am thankful for the progress I did make on each and every one of my initial goals.

By comparison, the research project taught me some different things. Identifying the research on coastal erosion for the Dominican Republic and the Caribbean in general were projects aimed at helping colleagues in the lab get a more solid foundation in the history of coastal erosion in the area, so my research was supplemental. As the research I was doing was basically looking for anything I could find related to beach nourishment and coastal erosion, it was sometimes difficult to read a huge variety of papers and then have to throw most of them away. That being said, as a result of this internship I had read more than 5 articles a day, and I think that my critical reading skills have really increased as a result of it. In addition, after attending the weekly lab meetings with other lab members I was able to take a look and see what kinds of very different projects each team was working on, which aside from being a cool experience was also really helpful in informing the research work that I was doing. There were a couple lab members who presented their work in the last few weeks that had really unique ways of presenting information that were really interesting to learn from, and I also got to see a lot of the inner workings of research collaborations and definitely picked up a thing or two.

More generally my summer goals were to learn a lot more about what working in an Earth Sciences field entails and have an informative and enjoyable time. To have completed this internship with an end result that I feel proud of, having learned and worked on my own abilities and projects that have allowed me to become a better scientist. I wanted to leave this internship knowing I have made a difference with something, and to have this experience open a door for me to undertake and tackle the more challenging problems in earth science. In summation, I wanted to develop and improve the baseline skills that will allow me to tackle projects and complete things well and in a reasonable time frame.

While I had a general idea of what the work would look like, it was a definite learning experience figuring out how to do a full time job and have enough time in the morning and the evening to do other things. Especially in working, I had a good amount of struggles with distraction and I think that I became very aware of the delicate balance between working the amount of hours you need to work and recognizing that working at a desk for long periods isn’t the best for your body or brain. I definitely got a lot better at working on an adequate work-life balance (especially with the unique struggles working from home can bring) and this job gave me a lot of pointers about potential pitfalls and potential shortcuts to achieving my goals. In summation, this internship did teach me a lot about my own goals and gave me a lot of good pointers and next steps to becoming a better researcher, and I also reminded me of all the progress that I have made previously and the room for growth and inquiry in the future.