{"id":6041,"date":"2019-07-14T15:18:52","date_gmt":"2019-07-14T22:18:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/seagrantscholars\/?p=6041"},"modified":"2019-07-14T15:19:19","modified_gmt":"2019-07-14T22:19:19","slug":"newport-new-cohorts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/seagrantscholars\/2019\/07\/14\/newport-new-cohorts\/","title":{"rendered":"Newport and New Cohorts!"},"content":{"rendered":"

June 28th, 2019:<\/p>\n

Hawaiian pancakes, farmers markets, whale flukes, beach runs, cherry pie, baby starfish, and brown weather boots\u2014the staple associations I\u2019ve made to Newport, Oregon and being a Sea Grant Summer Scholar thus far. To formally introduce myself, I\u2019m Dominique\u2014I just finished my junior year at UCLA, and was selected as a 2019 Summer Scholar for Position #2: Ecologically Monitoring the Oregon Marine Reserves. I\u2019m currently stationed at the Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport with four other Sea Grant Summer Scholars.<\/p>\n

I can honestly say Newport is the most wholesome city I\u2019ve ever visited\u2014to paint as vivid of a picture as I can, it\u2019s the exact opposite<\/em> of Los Angeles (where I\u2019ve lived the past 21 years). The air has that briny, crisp scent of seawater, traffic is nonexistent, dining options all comprise of \u201cMom & Pop\u201d restaurants, and the people are shockingly friendly\u2014they\u2019ll actually <\/em>make eye contact and chirp \u201cGood Mornin\u2019!\u201d to you when you pass them in the street.\u00a0 I\u2019ve now had over a week to get used to the quaint, small-town\/coastal vibes that Newport has to offer, and I absolutely love it. How could you not when your apartment is 50 feet away from the beach, an aquarium, and a baby seahawk nest?<\/p>\n

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View of the harbor from Newport Bridge<\/p><\/div>\n

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View of Newport Bridge from the South Jetty trail<\/p><\/div>\n

Though I\u2019m only here for 10 weeks, I\u2019m trying to acclimate as quickly as I can to the active Oregon lifestyle. After work, I go on 3 mile jogs through the estuary trail and along the South Jetty (if you exit the Hatfield parking lot and pass the Rouge Brewery, there\u2019s a mile-long trail that\u2019ll lead you to some sand dunes and the cleanest stretch of beach I\u2019ve ever seen). Last Saturday, the other Scholars and I walked into town\u2014which is a 3 mile round-trip over the bridge\u2014to check out the Farmer\u2019s Market. We sampled orange-zest chocolate, cinnamon-sugar butter (the best thing you\u2019ll ever try), smoked Colby-jack cheese, wild berry jam, and too many fresh cherries; I honestly don\u2019t know how I got away with sampling that many without getting asked to buy some or leave\u2014like I said, Oregon folk are nice<\/em>. The next day, we did the 3-mile trek again <\/em>to try out Pig-N-Pancake, the Newport staple brunch spot. We were lured in by the window advertisement of \u201cPineapple Coconut Pancakes\u201d, and like every other food item I\u2019ve tried in Newport, they did not disappoint.<\/p>\n

Without a doubt, the best part of this internship has been my exposure to all things new: new people, new places, new food, new experiences\u2014new knowledge<\/em>. They say: \u201cYa\u2019 learn something new every day\u201d but here, I swear that’s not the case:<\/em>\u00a0I\u2019m learning 12,203,942<\/em> new things every day. Last week my roommate taught me how to ferment and boil ginger to make kombucha. A few days ago my other <\/em>roommate taught me how to make a multi-layered carrot cake with cream-cheese frosting from scratch. Just yesterday, my roommate (again!<\/em>) taught me how to pit cherries and make pie crust without a rolling pin (hint: use a glass VOSS<\/em> water bottle, it\u2019ll do the trick). Most importantly, though, I\u2019ve learned what it takes to be an Ecological Marine Reserves Monitor stationed on the Newport coast.<\/p>\n

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Cherries found at the Saturday morning Farmer’s Market<\/p><\/div>\n

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Ariana’s lattice cherry pie before getting baked in the oven!<\/p><\/div>\n

I\u2019m just now realizing that I\u2019ve rattled on this entire time about food (it\u2019s 2:06 pm in the office and I haven\u2019t eaten lunch yet\u2014you can guess where my mind is at). Let me finally introduce my work! (though I honestly shouldn\u2019t even be calling it \u201cwork\u201d because what I do is too fun to be associated with that gloomy connotation). \u00a0For 10 weeks this summer, I\u2019m interning with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife\u2019s Ecological Marine Reserves team alongside Cori (my mentor), Lindsay, Jessica, and Stephanie. Our job is to ecologically monitor the five Marine Reserves along the coast\u2014Cape Falcon, Cascade Head, Otter Rock, Cape Perpetua, and Redfish Rocks\u2014via fish recruitment, urchin recruitment, sea star, and mussel bed surveys. Through these surveys, we can observe and analyze the changes in the rocky intertidal community since the Sea Star Wasting Disease (SSWD) outbreak hit the Oregon Coast in 2014 (I\u2019ll elaborate on this a bit later). My job comes with lots of field work\u2014Day 2 in Oregon and I was already half-submerged in tide pools tallying juvenile sea stars at Otter Rock! I\u2019ll stop here before I delve deeper in the explanation of my internship and what I have planned these upcoming weeks\u2014I have a ton of exciting field days scheduled and can easily rattle on for pages about what\u2019s to come. I\u2019ll save it for the next blog, so ~stay tuned~! :)<\/p>\n

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Me on my first day out in the field!<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

June 28th, 2019: Hawaiian pancakes, farmers markets, whale flukes, beach runs, cherry pie, baby starfish, and brown weather boots\u2014the staple associations I\u2019ve made to Newport, Oregon and being a Sea Grant Summer Scholar thus far. To formally introduce myself, I\u2019m … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9821,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6041","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p64Blw-1zr","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/seagrantscholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6041","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/seagrantscholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/seagrantscholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/seagrantscholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9821"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/seagrantscholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6041"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/seagrantscholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6041\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6048,"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/seagrantscholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6041\/revisions\/6048"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/seagrantscholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6041"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/seagrantscholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6041"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/seagrantscholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6041"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}