So, the first week I was extremely excited but of course nervous. The first couple of days were just filled with surveys, ice breakers, and short informative lectures. My favorite part of the week was the trip to the Mountain Research Station (MRS). We went into the mountains and camped overnight with periodic stops for bits of educational hikes. After the work day, our team of interns played board games and drank hot chocolate. It was so important to me to become close to my co-interns and this trip was the perfect way to do it.
The second week, I started with my mentor, who I love! My mentor is incredibly easy to talk to and fun to be around. This week was filled with reading scientific papers to prepare me for my project topic, which was pretty boring but necessary. I then started on a project that will unfortunately not be finished in time for this internship but I do plan to continue this work after the summer and possibly co-author the published paper that my mentor is in charge of. This work included sanding tree cores and dating them by counting back years from the bark end of the core. This was very tedious but also relaxing.
And now we are already in the third week!! The last couple of days I have grown mixed feelings. I still love the work and the people I am working with but I am concerned because I have not begun my summer project yet and we only have 5 weeks left until our rough drafts for the poster are due. I am so glad to be working on things that I can continue beyond this program and the opportunities are just flowing in but this summer project is kind of on the back burner for now.
To be continued – Shala Wallace
Hi Shala!
Perfect summation of the first week here, I also really enjoyed getting to know everyone better.
Regarding the project vs. our short time as interns – I am also working on a project that will not be completed before the summer is over. This project was started about a year ago and will continue for months after I leave, which, I feel, is humbling. To know that I am just a small cog in this huge machine filled with amazing minds is inspiring! When we finish the analyses we are working on, anybody else who works on this particular project, or a similar one, will most likely refer to charts and spreadsheets that I helped put together. As we have already seen, scientific papers are full of citations from other papers. I am content with the knowledge that my research can possibly help another researcher as well as the indigenous tribes in Wyoming!
As my mentor reminds me, “Science is a slow and steady process, we will get done what we get done”.
Happy tree ring counting!!
Great that you can continue on. Don’t worry you may not have the final data that you will collect on this project, but I am sure that Brian won’t let you end RECCS without some sort of intermediate end-point that you can report on. It’s always great to end a talk about next steps!