Hello!
Wow! I can’t believe we only have two weeks left here! The summer really flew by – we are already giving our final presentations!
I spent that majority of last week working on student profiles. As I explained in my last blog post, this required A LOT of emailing. I probably have 200+ emails floating around out there…which is probably a good thing since I only get responses to about 15% of those. It is summer – you can’t always count on people being attached to the hip with their email.
Anyway, after emailing lots and lots of faculty members from various colleges, departments, centers, and institutes, I collected a lot of undergraduate and graduate student names. I then emailed all of these students (using a standard template email I created) and asked them to fill in their information in the fields provided if they felt comfortable being featured. I used an example feature on graduate student Sarah Allan to give them a feel for what I was looking for.
Undergraduate students were a bit harder to track down than graduate students. Eric Dickey was kind enough to meet with me to help brainstorm other potential people to contact. Eventually, I had enough contacts to fill about two pages worth of undergraduate profiles and five pages worth of graduate profiles.
Between emails, I also worked on the “Research & Funding Opportunities” tab we created. I decided to use this tab as a sort of portal for link outs to the variety of opportunities offered at Oregon State (for example, I included the Oregon Sea Grant Summer Scholars Program in there). Jenna has made some edits to this page, so I will be tweaking things a little bit this week.
As far as this week goes, I have spent the majority of today (Monday), working on my final presentation and portfolio! I can’t believe the time has gone so fast – I have had such a good experience with this project! I have never had the opportunity to combine my artistic endeavors with my scientific interests, so this truly has been awesome.
After I get my presentation and portfolio wrapped up, I plan on spending the rest of the week working on the “Academics” tab, where I plan to highlight academic programs offered at the university to both graduates and undergraduates interested in the marine sciences. I will spend the last week I have here (after our presentation at HMSC) wrapping up some loose ends and writing up protocols for Jenna so that she can maintain the website with little trouble!
I’m excited to see everyone again this week! Good luck with preparation!
-Shealyn
Scientists are typically very creative people and must deal with challenges in unconventional ways. Sounds like you are doing a great job balancing your artistic and scientific sides!