![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wordpress.clarku.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/53\/2012\/04\/Sam-Palace.jpg\" "\\"Sam-Palace\\"")
<\/a>At the end of my junior year, I was beginning to worry that I hadn\u2019t been exposed to enough different kinds of research. I wanted to try absolutely everything before the end of my undergraduate career, and since \u201ceverything\u201d is rather a lot to cram into four years, it seemed to me as though I had to get cracking.<\/p>\n
At first I wasn\u2019t sure where to start. There are summer programs and research openings for undergraduates in just about every imaginable discipline and geographical location, and it took some serious sorting through before I could begin to figure out what I might want to try. In the end, I decided to look for a research-based job involving conservation and field work. (Because I felt that my goals were somewhat lacking in specificity, I also added \u201cincreased geographical proximity to tropical fruit\u201d to this list. Sadly, this last bit was not to be.) Feeling purposeful but vague, I poked around a bit more to see what I could make of my summer.<\/p>\n
I essentially stumbled into a position as the conservation genetics intern with\u00a0Kwi\u00e1ht<\/a>, a small conservation nonprofit dedicated to preserving the ecological integrity of the San Juan Islands and the Salish Sea. It was brilliant. My primary project involved determining the population structure of the islands\u2019 populations of cutthroat trout, which allowed me to expand my interest in genetics from the microbial level to the ecosystem scale. My work in the lab was regularly punctuated with forays out into the field, helping other people on the team with their projects and collecting more data for the genetics projects. I spent entire days seining at various beaches on the islands, collecting samples of native plant species, and taking surveys of tiny porcelain crabs. It was very nearly a dream job.<\/p>\n The islands are located between coastal northwest Washington and Vancouver \u2013 hence, no pineapple plantations or palm trees \u2013 but they\u2019re staggeringly beautiful in a guava-less kind of way. Since Kwi\u00e1ht rents their lab space from\u00a0Friday Harbor Laboratories<\/a>\u00a0on San Juan Island, the professional environment is every bit as impressive as the natural ambiance. Becoming an islander was quite an experience. It only took a few days for me to discover the various challenges involved with commuting (dictated by the ferry schedule), bicycling (uphill, always), and locals (who will insist on saying hello to you, asking you where you\u2019re living, and offering to show you their vegetable garden sometime, whether or not you happen to be late for your ferry). Almost as soon as I discovered these island eccentricities, however, I found them charming. Rush hour commuting through downtown Worcester has absolutely nothing on cruising to work on a ferry while listening to tourists arguing about which island it is that they\u2019re passing.<\/p>\n What really tied the whole thing together was a nifty little grant available through Clark\u2019s career services. The\u00a0Barth Summer Internship Awards<\/a>\u00a0provide stipends to students doing unpaid internships at nonprofit organizations. One of the things I immediately liked about Kwi\u00e1ht was that every last dime is stretched about as far as it can go, so that all of the various projects can continue even when sources of funding dry up. Because there was a way to secure independent funding through Clark, I could get myself to the west coast and back without worrying that I was depleting Kwi\u00e1ht\u2019s financial resources for underfunded (but important!) projects. I was even able to contribute some new reagents and lab materials to the effort.<\/p>\n In short, my summer with Kwi\u00e1ht was everything I had hoped it might be: instructional, unique, and enormously fun. For any aspiring science student, there\u2019s nothing quite as useful as actually experiencing hands-on, fulltime research. (Wouldn\u2019t you rather know what you\u2019re getting yourself into?) Going into my San Juan summer, I figured that even if I hated my job, I\u2019d at least learn something about what I didn\u2019t want to do. Coming out of it, my only regret is that I can\u2019t go back and do the same thing all over again.<\/p>\n