The ocean sciences meeting this year was located in San Diego, California. The meeting had roughly six thousand attendees and exhibitors, comprised of scientists, students at all levels, and science enthusiasts. Throughout the week, I attended oral presentations, standard poster sessions, and digital poster sessions. Many of the other interns from my time last summer at Bigelow were in attendance. Donoven was the only one who did a full oral presentation and he did very well. My other friends completed standard poster sessions. In the poster hall there were over three thousand posters on display. Only one of my other interns, Cat Mahoney, completed the digital poster session with me. All of the other undergraduates who presented at our session had very interesting projects. They were also highly diverse and no two were very similar.

My Junior year fall, Rollins gave me the opportunity to go to the Duke Marine Lab for a “semester abroad” in North Carolina. It was an amazing opportunity where I met other students with interests in marine biology. One of these students was D’amy Steward and she happened to be at the conference and presenting in the same digital session as I was. I was not aware of this before the conference and it was so wonderful to see her again. It really showed me how widespread the ASLO conference is and how many people actually attend. Oceanography and Limnology are very large fields but at the same time, they are a small world. Getting to meet other like-minded scientists was a cool experience I would not have gotten if I was unable to attend.

Me at my poster talking to a few scientists.

Me at my poster

Me presenting

At the ASLO, Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography, Ocean Sciences Meeting 2020, I took part in the undergraduate eLighting presentation. This means that I created a digital poster ( osm2020-agu.ipostersessions.com/Default.aspx?s=C3-D3-71-B7-18-D1-32-05-34-14-6C-5F-06-9A-64-A0 ) that shares similarities to a regular poster except that it can have YouTube videos and more space for pictures. My poster was on my research: Gulf of Maine Temperature-Salinity Curves from the Early 1900s (Henry Bigelow) Compared to the Present (Gulf of Maine North Atlantic Time Series) that I had completed this past summer at my Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) internship at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences. My project was completed with help from senior research scientist Dr. Barney Balch at Bigelow. My project entailed taking temperature and salinity data from the scientist Henry Bigelow, from the years 1912-1915, and comparing it to data taken from Henry Mission One from Gulf of Maine North Atlantic Time Series (GNATS), which occurred in 2008. GNATS data is actually from an autonomous glider named Henry. After examining the data, I stratified the data by latitude, longitude, and time of year to have a more accurate comparison of the data. Then I made Temperature-salinity plots using excel. The digital poster session started out with all people taking part in a short three-minute presentation to pitch our poster relevance and findings. After that we all stood near our posters and answered any questions from people who came by and had questions. It was an incredibly fulfilling experience to talk to a wide variety of scientists about the project I had completed.