Work Adventures

Now that I haven't posted in six months, I guess I should maybe talk about something...

I've mentioned before that I've had jobs like mail sorting and survey administering, but this summer I got a job related to my major. Along with two other ladies, I worked as a field research assistant for a couple of our professors. We drove a huge pickup truck to various locations in the Great Basin Desert (sites were previously selected and marked on GIS maps), using atlas and GPS to find each site. Every week was a different area, and we set up grids of live rodent traps at 3-5 sites every week. We also dug little pitfall traps for insects and did plant composition surveys (lots of sage and desert plants). Each week included three trapping days, so we set up Monday, camped and checked traps daily, and took down everything and headed back to town Thursday. It was a bit of an adjustment to living about half the time fairly primitively, but I came to appreciate the quiet time and all of our wilderness experiences. We caught some neat animals - lots of kangaroo rats (two species), deer mice, grasshopper mice, white-tailed antelope squirrels, wood rats, voles, a dark kangaroo mouse, and we even managed to get a weasel and a gopher snake! That was exciting. Oh, and because there seemed to be a lot of confusion when the girls and I would tell people about our job, we didn't kill or eat the rodents. We simply measured them, marked them by shaving a small patch of fur, and let them go. We actually recaptured a lot of them too (free food, a safe place for the night, and I don't get killed? Sign me up!)

So now it's back into school and I don't work on the research job anymore. I'm actually a teaching assistant for a different professor, although I don't work with a class exactly. You may remember the plant ID team I joined last year; well, the grad student that was the main coach is busy with her thesis this year, so I am now the coach/teacher while she still makes practice quizzes (since I'll still be competing as an undergrad) and shares her vast knowledge with us. It's kind of an overwhelming task: by the time we got meeting schedules arranged, we had only six weeks to learn 200 plants, and I still felt pretty inadequate trying to teach about all of them. It's also a bit scary because we lost some of our top people from last year to graduation. Nevertheless, we went to state competition last week, and as a team we took 2nd place on the plant test, the management test, and the combined scores. Individually, I came in 2nd  on each test (tied with my friend, our management coach on the management exam!) and won 1st for the combined score. It's a great feeling to be recognized for hard work and studying, and I hope we'll all do even better at the national meeting next semester.

In other news, I'm still having fun in my major. One class in particular includes lots of field trips and learning different field techniques. We've electroshocked fish in the local river, used radiotelemetry, tried out GIS, shot dart guns (we're not talking foam darts), and even set up motion-sensing cameras to sample the feral cat population on campus.

For a while I was wondering if law school would be a good option for me after I graduate (there's environmental or natural resource law), but after being in a law lecture series this semester, I'm thinking it's not the best fit. I will most likely go to grad school in a similar field to my current major but may try a different university just to shake things up a bit. It's kind of scary, but I'm not graduating quite yet. At any rate, I'm certain that it will all work out splendidly.