Project ProposalEvery year, the juniors at Animas High School have a three week internship in March. We start planning the internships at the beginning of the year, and then, hopefully, everything falls into place. The fun thing about these internships is that you have the ability to do anything that interests you.
I will be interning at the University of New Hampshire lab, located on one of the Coast Guard Stations. This lab is for the use of UNH students and some private users who rent the space. In the lab, there are two other main lab users; Nate and Nick. I am not entirely sure what their roles are at the lab, but I’m pretty sure that they will be great. I’ve also talked to Shelley, and there are other high schoolers who do experiments at the lab too. My mentor is Shelley Edmundson. How I met her is that she is dating one of my uncles. So I have connection everywhere. An interesting thing about Shelley, is that she is one of the only people in the world who is studying whelks. There is a large demand for whelks in China, so Shelley is trying to get more information about whelks, like their breeding habits, how to tell the age, etc. I am really excited about working with Shelley because she really loves what she does and really gets into discussions about whelks. I only have a few goals for this internship: to fly alone, living by myself, good time management skills and to learn a lot about whelks. I believe that my project will be something to do with the feeding habits of whelks both in the wild and in captivity. I am also going to be working on the egg strings that have little baby whelks. So that will be counting and measuring the babies with a microscope. Shelley is using me to do some of the work that she has just pushed off the side. A skill that I am going to need to strengthen during LINK is my time management skills. I will be staying by myself for the three weeks, so I will be needing to schedule everything perfectly, so that I can get my work done for Shelley. The steps that I am going to need to finish my project is to watch videos from fields and from the lab to watch for any patterns in feeding the whelks. Then, I also need to have days for the egg strings because I have to do all the counting and measuring in the lab, so the videos can be done really anywhere. So the egg strings are on top of the list. One obstacle that I have run into already is that my first internship had fallen through due to the difficulties of finding me something to do. But then I got in contact with Shelley, and she was so excited about the idea that she said yes almost immediately, and then decided to ask for permission from UNH. All in all, the three weeks of interning adulthood will be a brand new experience that I cannot wait to have. This internship is just a little taste of what it’s like to be an adult. |
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