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.