Peter Willits

Goals for Summer 2020

Through this internship I plan to apply skills I have learned during my undergraduate career, learn a variety of new skills, and gain useful experience and connections. My internship tasks include applying programs I have learned in college including Excel, MATLAB, and GIS. I am excited to use these programs to solve real-world problems pertaining to data management and analysis. I am also excited to learn new field surveying and water quality testing techniques.

In addition to further developing my scientific computing skills, I look forward to honing my communication and writing skills. I found that my undergraduate coursework at UCSC focused on conceptual knowledge and glossed over professional communication, which I see as an important skill in which I have little experience. Having never worked in this field, I look forward to learning communication skills appropriate for a professional work environment.

I see this internship as an important link between my undergraduate education and a professional career. I have gained a foundation of knowledge on relevant concepts and tools, but I have little experience applying my knowledge outside of a classroom environment. I hope that this internship will open the door to a professional career by allowing me to apply my knowledge as well as to become comfortable working in a professional environment and communicating with older, more experienced professionals. I hope that with the experience and connections I take from this internship I will be more prepared to gain employment in the future.

How Covid-19 changed my summer plans

If someone had told me in December the events would unfold in the first half of 2020, I would have thought I was having a fever dream. At that time, I was loosely planning my last summer vacation ever around field work, camping, rock climbing, and visiting old friends up and down the coast. As news of the Covid-19 virus spread, I was forced to cross items off my list of summer plans not because I had completed them but because I would never get the chance to start them. However, to avoid boredom and atrophy, I have attempted to replace each opportunity I cross off with a new one, modifying my action packed summer to one that is mellow yet fulfilling.

The bedrock of my towering column of summer goals was completing the summer field geology course offered through UCSC. This was to be the keystone in my undergraduate education as a geologist, and I hoped that it would give me experience as well as further inspiration to propel me into to the next stage of my life. During spring quarter I put countless hours into preparing for this course by making detailed maps and reading research papers, all the while uncertain if I would be able to go to the field. While my classmates and I remain hopeful that an exception to the in-person education restriction will be made and allow us to go late in the summer, we have been forced to pursue other opportunities.

One upshot of this change to my summer plans is that had the field course run, I would have never applied for summer internships. Faced with the reality that I would be stuck at home for the summer, I decided to apply to GEOPATHS internships run through UCSC so I could gain some relevant experience instead of withering on the couch. I ended up scoring an internship at the Elkhorn Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve that is engaging and rewarding. I never thought that I would be doing wetlands science, but I find the work to be interesting and the people I work with are great. In this sense, the lockdown forced me to change my plans towards something I would not have done otherwise, and I am finding it very enjoyable.

On the recreational side of things, I have substituted gardening and making music at home in place of long trips and visiting friends and family. The biggest downside of this situation currently is that I miss my loved ones, and given the attitude towards the virus by our politicians I do not know when I will be able to see them again. With that said, I am grateful that that is my biggest concern. I am lucky to still have opportunities in a time where so many people have none, and I am happy to be making the best of the situation by continuing to learn and take time to reflect.

GeoScience Career Panel Reflection

Pat Hoban's career path stood out to me as he was faced with a similar situation in terms of job prospects as we are today. I have been struggling to find a job in the Santa Cruz area given the state of the world, and I can't help but worry that the job market is flooded with unemployed, experienced professionals who have been laid off due to the pandemic. This situation is similar to the one Pat graduated into in the early 1980s following the oil bust that began in the 1970s–hearing his story of optimism and flexibility gave me hope for my job prospects. I have been considering widening the scope of my search outside of earth science related positions as I have to support myself one way or another, but I worried about straying too far from the vague idea of a path that I have in my head. Hearing Pat, as well as the other panelists, say that it is normal and okay to not score the perfect geology-related job directly out of undergrad was a great relief.

One thing that resonated with me was Pat's focus on maintaining a positive mental attitude and accepting opportunities that seem imperfect or not directly related to your career goals. I am a firm believer that your attitude is the only thing you are fully in control of, and that staying positive and grateful for what you have is the only way to be fulfilled. So many people I know are fully engrossed in achieving their next goal and landing their next position, so much so that they never stop to take pride in all they have accomplished and to be grateful for the opportunities they have had. I fall into this trap from time to time, and this internship is a great example. Working at the Elkhorn Slough doing wetlands science is not the position I set out for when I applied, and I was hesitant to take it. Only now do I see that even though the material is not exactly what I want to end up studying, I am learning important skills and genuinely enjoying the work I am doing. After hearing what the panelists had to say, I am prepared to take on more opportunities like this one that seem inopportune at first glance rather than waiting around for the perfect position to pop up.

In all, this career panel helped me to take a breath and realize that it is not the end of the world if I don't end up following the career path I have in my head. I feel more prepared to roll with the punches, try new things, and take my time reaching a gratifying long-term position.

Final Reflection

Goals

At this beginning of my internship at the Elkhorn Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve (ESNERR) I set forth three primary goals for myself; I wanted to further my scientific computing abilities, practice professional communication, and become more prepared for a career after college. Looking back, I can say that I achieved all of these goals and that my expectations were overtopped in terms of the research I was able to participate in.

Much of my work at ESNERR was centered around scientific computing and data management. I worked with one of my supervisors to update a code that appends new water quality data to an existing parent database and allows for easy plotting of multiple parameters at multiple sites. I also wrote a code that sorts data based on tidal stage, allowing scientists at ESNERR to conduct robust comparisons of water quality parameters that are tide dependent. I also used ArcGIS to analyze aerial imagery taken with a UAV; this was a new experience for me and opened my eyes to the power of remote sensing beyond Lidar imagery. The experience in text-based computer programming and geographic information systems I gained through this internship will no doubt prove useful; I have already used some of this experience working at a new job and I see more and more problems that seem interesting rather than daunting as my familiarity with programming increases.

My second goal was to improve my professional communication skills. In some ways, my hand was forced in this one; I was thrust into the world of emails and meetings. I became much more comfortable cold-emailing people–this had always given me stress in the past but with a little practice I ambled upon the realization that the perceived risk associated with putting yourself out there doesn't really exist. This skill will definitely serve me well, as getting a job in the midst of a global pandemic without in-person meetings is definitely going to require me to put myself out there.

As far this internship serving as a link between college and a career, I feel that I learned things through experiences that cannot necessarily be taught in a classroom. I gained a better feel for the job market and job search process by talking to my peers and completing exercises focused on cover letter writing and job applications. I also talked to a lot of working professionals and learned about their career paths; this in particular made me feel more confident in myself as it seems that uncertainty after finishing college was a common feeling for many people who now have interesting careers in the geosciences. I also became more inclined to taking opportunities that seem imperfect, or tangential to my career development. I was hesitant to take this internship as it was not focused on what I want to study, but I learned a lot and made good connections through it.

One thing I wish I knew before going into this internship was a good method of budgeting my time and staying on track without assignments and deadlines. My supervisors were very relaxed about me and my work, so I was not held to any strict deadlines–this was new for me, and I found it hard to keep myself on track and hold myself accountable for my own productivity.

Research

My research project was focused on using GPS ground truth data to constrain the feasibility of using aerial imagery to perform water quality/marsh health assessment via image classification. Unhealthy, poorly circulated marshes at the Elkhorn Slough undergo eutrophication, causing thick algal mats to grow over the water's surface. The coverage of these mats can be used as a proxy for water quality and marsh health, so we want to look at how this cover changes over time. One way of doing this is to use an image classification algorithm to identify what portion of the marsh is covered with water vs. algae vs. marsh plants. Training such an algorithm is a subjective matter, however, as it requires a user to identify polygons of each class in the aerial image. In order to assess the ability of wetlands scientists to accurately identify each class from aerial imagery, I used a handheld GPS receiver to take points in the field representing each class. Three wetlands scientists were then asked to identify which class was present at these points in the image, and their answers were compared with the actual class.

The results showed that the manual classifications performed by the scientists at ESNERR were near perfect. This is useful as it validates to some degree the ability of these scientists to train classification algorithms and assess their accuracy. The classification algorithm was relatively successful at recognizing the different classes; we checked its classification at 95 random points and found that it had a ~88% success rate. This indicates that given "clean" aerial imagery (with little glare and clipped of non-marsh), an automated classification can be used to determine marsh cover type assuming classes are kept simple as they were in this study. These results will be useful as they allow for automated classification of aerial imagery to be implemented as a way to track changes in water quality and marsh health over time.