Connor Roebuck

My goals for Summer 2021 are to gain valuable experience working with my mentor from NASA during the internship, and to get a better understanding of what it's like working on these types of projects. I also want to focus on making connections that will benefit me in the future in terms of my career path. I'm really looking forward to the 8 weeks that I'll be working, so I want to make sure that I'm as motivated and focused as I can be while being as efficient as possible. While these 8 weeks will challenge me in many ways, I want to remember to have fun and enjoy this experience because it could be the beginning of the career path I've been looking for.

What have you learned so far in your internship? (week 3 update)

My internship experience so far has been productive but also challenging through the first couple of weeks. I’ve been learning a lot about ocean nutrients and how they are affected by factors such as depth, time of year, and salinity in the water. This kind of information is important because one of my main goals for this project is to figure out what is limiting phytoplankton growth in the North Atlantic Ocean. I have also learned a lot more about coding through MATLAB, and how to write code that will produce plots and visualizations of the data I’ve been given. These plots that I’ve been coming up with have shown me things like what time of year nutrients are most abundant in the water, and what depth they are most abundant at. I had taken a few coding/computer science classes before beginning this internship so I had some familiarity with using it, but with some help from my mentor, Dan Whitt, it’s been a great learning experience to this point. This internship has also provided me with an opportunity to improve my time management, communication skills, and problem solving abilities. Part of what makes this project so interesting is that I’m able to do a lot of my own research and explore different paths that could possibly lead to the end goal. The project I’m working on is relatively new at NASA so it’s been a fun yet challenging experience deciding which direction to go while trying to develop code that will be beneficial to my research. With the majority of the internship still ahead of me, I’m really excited to see what we will discover by the end of the 8 weeks.

How will attending AGU advance your academic and career goals?
Attending AGU will help advance my academic and career goals by giving me an opportunity to be around more professionals in my career area, and providing me with a chance to improve and work on my communication skills. Being put in a position where I need to be able to answer questions and have adequate knowledge about my project will help me communicate better with others and interact with them in a more professional manner. I think AGU will also provide me with a chance to show what I’ve learned through the 8 week internship, which is important because it will keep me motivated to do my best work and see what I can discover or find by the end of the internship. I think the most beneficial aspect of the meeting for me will be the presentation, as I touched on before. Completing the work during these 8 weeks is a part of the challenge, but I’m really looking forward to having an opportunity to show people what I can do, and what I’ve learned. Being a student at UCSC for 4 years has definitely given me many chances to work on these communication and interaction skills and abilities, but being part of a conference with so many others who have careers in science-related areas will be even more beneficial to my future.