Interning at the Oregon Coastal and Ocean Information Network forced me to become a jack of all trades – working on outreach emails, interviewing researchers and writing spotlight articles, drafting a budget, and understanding ArcGIS online. I have gained valuable experience in areas that I could never have imagined at the start of my internship because I was willing to jump into any and all projects, even those outside of the scope of original internship description!

With wonderful mentors in the Sea Grant CEI program, and within OCOIN itself, I learned the importance of networking and met passionate ocean and coastal researchers. I am also grateful for my coworker and fellow summer scholar, Joshua, who I teamed up with at OCOIN to divide and complete all of our summer tasks. Together we have navigated working in a remote environment, learning new software, and optimizing a research mapping tool. Our teamwork allowed us to share and learn from one another and organize our agendas and workloads like a real professional team.

As I enter the last few weeks of my internship, I look forward to organizing OCOIN’s annual meeting and updating more research in our mapping tool that will help our research network stay connected throughout the year to come.