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Gotta have a good eye to find these guys.<\/p><\/div>\n
Fortunately, my volunteers did as well. My volunteer pool is basically the other summer interns living at Hatfield Marine Science Center. All of them are passionate scientists and most are accustomed to fieldwork, which makes them stellar sea-star surveyors. I\u2019m really grateful for all of their help and how excited they are to lend a hand. Additionally, after the survey we all went for some of those legendary cinnamon rolls I raved about in my previous blog post. Great day.<\/p>\n
I spent most of the rest of the week toiling on my final presentation. This involved a lot of work in excel cleaning up datasets, punching in numbers, running stats, and making graphs that looked pretty. Sounds a little tedious, but all in all not a bad gig. Remember, I\u2019m a nerd, so data analysis is actually pretty cool to me. In addition, I authored another installment of my SMURF blog and power-washed some SMURFs. This was all done in anticipation of the weekend though.<\/p>\n
Last weekend (weekend of the 12th<\/sup>) was the Seaside Volleyball Tournament, aka my opportunity to make all that time spent playing beach volleyball this summer finally count. Turns out I love volleyball. I\u2019ve never played it competitively before this summer unless you count 5th<\/sup> grade gym class when I broke Nick Hipple\u2019s glasses (sorry Nick), but this summer it\u2019s been my main afterwork pastime. Early in the summer, three of my coworkers and I signed up to play in the Seaside Tournament, the largest amateur tournament in the world. My three teammates have all played competitively before and are super talented bumpers, setters, and spikers. Me? I\u2019m tall. That was pretty much the only qualification that got me on the team. But I\u2019ve played a lot this summer and I\u2019d like to think I\u2019ve improved. At least, Megan make fun of me less now than she did before.<\/p>\n Anyways back to the tournament. Our team was named \u201cPretty Good\u201d in honor of our talent level, but we played like champions.<\/p>\n Still working on getting the Pretty Good high-five down<\/p><\/div>\n We utterly smashed \u201cBBJ\u201d and \u201cstone cold chillerz\u201d in our first two games of pool play (coincidentally, \u201cstone cold chillerz\u201d is my least favorite team name ever). In our third game of pool play we played the best game of our lives but lost a barn-burner to \u201cTopher Rocks\u201d (Topher did, in fact, rock). Finally, we bowed out in the knockout round against one of last year\u2019s champions and his new team, the AJs. Major props go to Sawyer for being 6\u20196\u201d and raining death and destruction down on our opponents from above. Megan\u2019s sets were so perfect that even I couldn\u2019t mess some of them up. Gabby worked harder than all the rest of us combined, and was covered in sand constantly as a result. For my part, I didn\u2019t screw up too much. The real MVP though was our cheering section. Almost the entire intern population of Hatfield trekked up to Seaside with us and screamed their heads off in support. Legendary. Always nice to take a break from all the science to enjoy some sports.<\/p>\n The Real MVPs.<\/p><\/div>\n BUT. Anyhow, back to the science. I\u2019ve now made it up to the beginning of last week! This week was supposed to be entirely consumed by working on my final poster\/presentation, but somehow other stuff kept coming up. First of all, though, last Monday we had an ODFW Marine Reserves cookout after work partially in honor of Neal, Sarah, and I coming to the end of our program. It was a great reminder of how awesome the people I\u2019ve worked with this summer are. The Marine Reserves team is full of brilliant scientists who are also genuinely cool people. There are plenty of graduate degrees spread amongst them, as well as plenty of experiences living in countries all over the world. Conversation topics range from \u201chow to succeed in science\u201d to \u201chow awesome was Game of Thrones last night??\u201d It\u2019s a great group of people to work with and learn from.<\/p>\n Back at work, I worked on my poster and presentation, but also spent an entire day road-tripping down to Port Orford to collect SMURF samples. Not a lot of work got done on my personal agenda that day, but I\u2019m a big fan of throwing on some podcasts and driving so I consider it a success. My project did come together eventually though! With the help of my aforementioned co-workers, I put together what I believe was a solid presentation for our final symposium last Friday, as well as a nice poster. The symposium was a cool event in that it gave us an opportunity to share what we\u2019ve worked so hard on all summer, and also learn from the other Sea Grant Scholars at the same time. My fellow Sea Grants are a pretty impressive group of people \u2013 incredibly smart and incredibly dedicated to their fields, which extend beyond just marine ecology. Definitely an awesome group that I\u2019m proud to be a part of.<\/p>\n Dang I’m gonna miss Oregon’s coast.<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When I left you last week, I was still a little behind, having just finished describing my sister\u2019s wedding. Now, I find myself woefully behind once more. Maggie\u2019s wedding is old news, so now we can go back to what\u2019s … Continue reading ![\"\"](\"http:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/seagrantscholars\/files\/2017\/08\/veeb-300x200.jpg\")
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