Now that I've given you a general background of my location and program, I'll tell you all about my first week!
I arrived here on Sunday at around 5pm. I landed at Boston's Logan Airport and took a Peter Pan bus from the airport to Woods Hole. On the bus over, I ran into a few of the other PEPsters; Rachel, Emily, Zach, Alex, and Delawrence. We all introduced ourselves and began to take those first awkward steps to becoming friends. I'm pretty sure most of us passed out on the ride over - I know I did. It had been a loooooong morning of traveling and lugging around 50 pound suitcases.
When I woke up, we were in Falmouth, which is the town that houses Woods Hole. I saw us cross the huge Bourne bridge and pass a welcome sign made of hedges that said "Welcome to Cape Cod!". When we arrived at Steamship Authority in Woods Hole, we all dismounted and waited for the program directors to come and pick us up. When Dr. Ambrose Jearld arrived in a blue government vehicle, half of us loaded up and headed to the campus of the Sea Education Association (SEA). When we got there, we met two other PEPsters who had arrived a couple hours before we did: Brian and Chris. They were busy assembling a gas grill for the barbecue that was scheduled for the next day. I left them to their task and went to go unpack my things in Deneb House (D house). I later found out I was living with Delawrence, Zachary, Lucy, Angela, Rachel, Anna-Mai, Alex, and Brian in D house.
The rest of the day, I just unpacked a few things (I found out that we would be moving to another campus in a few days so I didn't unpack everything), socialized with the other PEPsters, met the Student Coordinator, Joniqua a.k.a. "J", had a short orientation with Debbie and Virginia, two faculty members from SEA, and went to bed!
The next day, we took a ferry from Woods Hole to Martha's Vineyard. Here's our first picture together!
In this photo: (Back Row) Chris, Brian, Dolores, Melika, Nam, Zach, Alex (Front Row) Emily, Angela, Rachel, Diara, ME!, Lucy, Delawrence.In the Vineyard, we explored the area, admired all the pretty houses and beaches, and took lots of pictures! After we got back to Woods Hole, we had a great barbecue and had a series of random conversations until late in the night. We probably shouldn't have done that since we had to be up at 7am the next morning for our official orientation but it was totally worth it because we we're all beginning to bond. =)
The next day we had orientation! We learned about the program and the course we were going to take (Global Climate Change: Ocean and Environmental Sciences) and then we each officially introduced ourselves with a powerpoint we had to prepare before we arrived in Woods Hole. We then met our research mentors for the summer and had our first lecture. It was led by Skee Houghton from the Woods hole Research Center (WHRC) and it was titled "Introduction to Climate Change and the Global Carbon Cycle". It was really interesting because it tied to my research project of the summer; Carbon Fluxes in Trees in Harvard Forest with a focus on Stem and Leaf Respiration. After the lecture we had the day to ourselves.
The next day was our first day of classes. We learned about rapid climate change in the Antarctic Marine Ecosystem from Hugh Ducklow of the Ecosystems Center of the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) and how the earth's natural archives can be tapped for past climate information from Heather Benway (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute [WHOI]) and Matt Arsenault (United States Geological Survey [USGS]). The first lecture discussed evidence of climate change by examining the extent of ice cover in Antarctica and how it relates to krill populations and then about how certain megafauna populations like those of seals and penguins are affected by the changing water conditions. The second lecture was FASCINATING! It discusses the intricacies of paleoclimatology, which is the reconstruction of past conditions using natural archives like corals, marine sediments, tree rings, and cave structures. We learned a little about the ocean currents (It takes the earth's largest current 1,000 YEARS to run one of its cycles), variations in the earth's orbits, how these different archives are used to tell past climatic conditions, and how scientists collect information from the cores they withdraw from the archives. Heather and Matt were fresh off cruises they went on to collect data and I thought it was awesome how they were both so excited with what they were doing. I got my first glimpse into the life of a real scientist that day and it excited me! (If you have any questions about any of the topics I just threw out, email me and we can go over them together! [vmm37@cornell.edu])
We then had our first Writing Workshop with one of the program directors, George Liles. George is also the curator at the aquarium in Woods Hole which is run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). He got two MAs in Creative Writing and Education and he's worked as a journalist and a science writer. His job was to teach us how to write effectively and in a way that the general public can understand, which are both skills that scientists should have. He gave us our first assignments and then we had the rest of the day to ourselves.
On Thursday morning we had to move out of our SEA housing and into houses on WHOI's village campus. It was a crazy morning! We then had class at WHOI's Clark Lab with Dr. Michael Fogarty (NOAA), who spoke to us about Ecosystem-Based Fisheries Management and Policy. We were all nodding off because of the 5am move out and Dr. Fogarty, being the wonderful and understanding guy he is, took us to this diner called The Buttery and let us all load up on coffee for the rest of his lecture. We then had a very terse crash course on statistics from Andy Solow (WHOI).
On Friday, we had class in the same place with Dr. Fogarty again and he gave us a status report on the ecosystem of the Northeast Continental Shelf. Later on in the day, he took us to two marshes in West Falmouth and Little Sippiwissett for a collection exercise. We went seining, which is the act of collecting fish in a pond with a drag net. We all had a blast until the mosquitoes and sand flies devoured us! Here are some pics of our little adventure:
Picture on left: Me and two other PEPsters holding a seining net in Little Sippiwissett Marsh. Above Picture: The whole PEP gang with George, Ambrose, and Dr. Fogarty right before heading home. A squad of mosquitoes were attacking us as the picture was taken!Our first weekend was pretty uneventful and so concludes my first week in Woods Hole!
