To be honest, this week has breezed by so quickly that I am having trouble recollecting everything I have been up to. The only thing that sticks out in my mind about this week is some very important news I got about the Australia job…

I GOT THE JOB!!!!!!!!!! I AM GOING TO SHARK BAY AUSTRALIA!

Whew, now that the cat is out of the bag I can breathe easy. I officially found out the news on Tuesday evening via email. I’m extremely excited to be a part of the research team, and even more excited to finally have an answer to what I’m doing this fall. Much of my post-OSG plans had been hinging on whether or not I was going to get this job. As a result of getting the position, I will not be applying to graduate school this year and instead will prolong the process to next fall. After I get back from Australia in the end of December, my plan is to move to Portland to get my Graduate Certificate in Geographic Information Systems through PSU.

If you are interested in learning more about the project that I will be a part of, watch the video at http://www2.fiu.edu/~heithaus/SBERP/index.html

Alright, now back to the land of working at Oregon Sea Grant. As you know from my previous post, I am finally able to move forward on my event planning project and I have made progress with that this week. My biggest accomplishment was writing up some “proposals” on what the breakout sessions for the event would look like. So far in planning the event, our planning group has given a lot of lip service to having breakout sessions, but have not made our ideas concrete. I decided that it was time to move forward on figuring out what these sessions could look like. After meeting with some people and doing a lot of reading, I was able to develop a solid outline for us to work with.

An interesting side project I was thrown into this week was working in the areas of fisheries economics. Some of the staff at OSG decided that one of the impact statements I worked on needed better numbers to quantify the economic impact that was being claimed in the document. I spent a large portion of this week digging through economic reports on the fishing industry in Oregon and stock assessments of certain target species for the industry. Needless to say, it was a grueling process and made my head hurt. However, in light of the project making my brain want to explode, I found it interesting. I’m a very analytical thinker and I really like working with numbers. A lot of working on this project required me to problem and solve and think about how I could take X value and turn it into Y value.

On a not-so-serios note, I think my office is a inter-species breeding ground for insects. First, I’ve been getting returning visits from the hornets of doom. It’s always a pleasant surprise to have one swarm around my head when I’m in the middle of a phone call. Second, I have had a new species of insect cropping up in my office. It looks like a dragonfly mated with a carpenter ant. I don’t know where they are coming from, but they have taken an affinity to me and my office. My co-workers are now used to my daily yelps from the office and running out to grab paper towels to squash the flying visitors. At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone told me that Ballard sits on top of a nuclear waste site; it would explain all the genetic freaks of nature that keep cropping up.

To end this post I’d like to wish good luck to all the other scholars who are heading back to their colleges/jobs/internships in other areas of the US. As for me, I’ll still be lurking about Sea Grant for another two weeks. Stay tuned for more stories from “The Adventures of AnnaRose and the 3rd floor of Ballard.”