Hello all! I hope everyone is enjoying their time so far! Before I begin recounting the past week’s events, I would like to introduce myself briefly (I forgot to give a short bio in the last blog post I did).

Brief Bio

So, my name is Shealyn Friedrich and I will be a senior next year at Willamette University (a small liberal arts college about 45 minutes from here in Salem, OR) – shout outs to Lauren Dimock! I will spend next year finishing up my Biology major (I have a minor in Spanish), and thesis-ing! I am looking to go into science education, and the outreach aspect of the Oregon Sea Grant Summer Scholars Program is perhaps what drew me in the most. I am looking into doing a year long masters program after undergrad to receive my Masters of Arts in Teaching (MAT), after which point I hope to teach higher level high school biology. I am very excited about this internship with Sea Grant because, although I have had a broad background in biology, I have not yet had an opportunity to get a taste of the marine sciences specifically. This should be a great time, and I’m excited to be contributing to scientific outreach while exploring some of my own untapped interests! On my free time, I enjoy running, writing, and painting among other things.

Last Week’s Progress

This past week I was really able to wrap my head around my project. I feel pretty settled now, and I have a plan as to where I am going with this! My top priority for the website is going to be research feature stories – at least for starters. We want to draw people into this site, and we want to target both policy makers as well as prospective students! I spent the beginning of this week poking around for information on all of the institutes and departments represented in the marine council. From the information I gathered, I made a rather extensive list of potential feature stories. After meeting with Jenna (my mentor), we came to the conclusion that the list would need to be refined. We also agreed that we should schedule a meeting with communications.

I refined my list down to about 5 overarching feature stories, 5 feature stories on graduate students, and 2 features on undergrads (there is so much going on in the marine sciences at OSU!). On Friday, Jenna and I met with Dave Barner and Nick Houtman among others to discuss the website. We created a plan for what the website should look like, and we discussed content as well. According to Dave and Nick, Terra magazine (as well as several other sites) have pre-existing feature stories that we agreed I should use before writing from scratch. After I gather all of the relevant material and begin designing the website, then I will be able to go back and conduct interviews to write pieces that may fill in any gaps that we find. I also had a meeting with Pat Kight (Oregon Sea Grant web communications) to discuss existing resources.

This Week’s Plan

Everyone has been so helpful in helping me get on track with this project – I am so grateful! Today I plan to spend some time collecting pre-existing stories and creating a list of features that can be pulled from other sources for the website.  I will also try and create a new template for the website design that adheres to some of the things we discussed in our meeting with Dave and Nick. Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday I will be taking an all day Drupal training course. Drupal is the web content management system that I will be using to create the website! I anticipate that Friday will consist of picking up where I left off today (Monday)!

Hope everyone has a very happy week! Good luck all! Enjoy Oregon!