I went to the Virgin Islands, St. John
with my marine biology travel-learning course
and my project is about parrotfish grazing
and its effect that it has on algal and
coral abundance and Caribbean reefs. It
was really amazing I had no idea I would
do as much as I've done in my first year
of college. Being a part of a travel-learning
course like this and getting to travel
my first time out of the U.S. and doing
research like this, you really realize
what you're capable of as a first
year and it is the really eye-opening
experience in and just make to feel
really good about the stuff you can
accomplish in just your first year of
college. One of the things that was
really neat about Abbi's project is it
was an outcome of a travel-learning
course that she has taken with me and
Dr. Jackson in the math department. We're
co-teaching a class called
"Marine Biology: Combining Mathematical and Field Approaches" and as part of the course the
students spend the first half of the
semester learning about basic models and
theories of how we might understand
marine biological systems and then we
get to travel to those systems, in this
case over spring break to St. John in
the Virgin Islands and actually see
those systems firsthand.
Working with Dr. Downey and Dr. Jackson has been
really amazing. They really challenge you.
They've been really encouraging, really
supportive, they sit down with you if you
don't understand and just work with you
until you get it.
So Abby and her collaborators came up
with a project that was based on some of
these models and theories we had learned
in the classroom. Then they got to go
out in the field. And most of her
collaborators were actually freshmen,
first-year students who had this
opportunity, and were able to go out and
actually observe the organism they
learned about in class and try and
collect the field data that tried
to test and support their hypotheses.
It was really fun to be able to see
their excitement of actually seeing
those organisms for real in the
actual marine systems that they
spend all this time in the classroom
learning about before they went. It's
really rewarding to have went through
the highs and lows of doing field
research and then have it on display for
people to learn about.
