Sarah Groff

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

The Seymour Center houses a very large collection of marine animals, many of which were born and raised on site. As of right now, we have approximately 625 organisms in our care, not counting the thousands of juvenile jellyfish, anemones and colonial organisms we house. These animals range from larger vertebrates like swell sharks and large bony fish, to invertebrates such as octopi, to all of the stages of life of jellyfish, from the tiny beginning stage polyp to the fully grown adult, and represent around 80 different animal species. Our facility is open to the public outdoors on Saturdays from 11 to 2 pm, where community members can come visit and learn about the marine environment and organisms that inhabit it. The Seymour Center also hosts weekly programs for kids called Ocean Explorers, in which all ages of children are able to spend a week in the Seymour Center learning about marine animals. While I am not involved with these programs directly, I do communicate with those running the activities and the people participating in them, and thus have developed communication skills between myself and the other interns and workers in the facility, as well as the community members that visit us during our open hours.

In my internship at the Seymour Center so far, I have learned how to care for each of the individual marine animals that are in our care, and pride myself in maintaining a specific feeding and cleaning schedule that supports each organism and provides it with a comfortable environment tailored to them. My routine is fairly straightforward and repetitive, and in executing this routine every day, I have picked up skills in maintaining personal and animal safety, preparing food for and feeding the animals, techniques for cleaning tanks in an aquatic environment, and responsibly attending to dead animals or those plagued by illness. This has helped me strengthen my attention to detail, as these tasks must be performed with the utmost care as the lives of these animals are at stake. I have also developed communication skills between myself and my PI, as well as the other facility workers.

How will attending AGU advance your academic and career goals?

At AGU, I hope to network with other undergraduate students that have similar interests as myself, along with companies that I could possibly work with in the future. This will be the first conference I have ever attended, so I’m hoping to strengthen my public speaking skills and my ability to present my own work. Academically, I hope this will push me to attend more conferences in the future, and have more confidence in myself as a writer and presenter. As far as career goals, I hope that attending AGU will get me in touch with possible career options and allow me to navigate the different paths that I could follow after completing my undergraduate degree. I think the peer review of my poster will be the most beneficial for my personal growth academically and career wise, as both reviewing other people's work and having others view mine will give me a chance to see what other research people are doing, what fields interest me most, and where I could see my career advancing in the future, as well as get feedback on the work I have done over the summer, how I presented it, and the ways I could better my presentation.