An Exciting Two Weeks And An Even More Exciting Two Weeks

Last week I was unable to post a research update due to the excitement of what was going on, so I thought that this week I would catch everyone up on what has been happening, and why I couldn't post last week.

Last Monday, Dr. Ingels and I set out on a sampling trip as part of his benthic survey at the marine lab. The survey is an ambitious project with 30 stations, which means lots of mud, along three separate transects at the lab. On Monday, we wanted to try to collect samples along those transects at sites that I am looking at for some of my research, and we also wanted to try out a new boat. Turns out that pontoons are the way to go when it comes to sediment coring. The flat surface made it much easier to haul the cores from the ocean floor, and the lack of barriers on the sides of the sampling deck meant that we could lean over the side to grab the cores as they came out of the water. The MVP of the entire sampling trip were Dr. Ingels' modified rubber stoppers to plug the end of the sediment corer. If you look back to some of the Panama City sampling trip photos, you may see a sediment core with orange/red caps on the end. The caps are what we put on the cores when they come out of the water, but the caps are difficult to get on, which means that the sediment may slide out of the corer before we can take samples. On my sampling trips, I estimate that I lose between 5 and 10 cores because of issues with the caps. On Monday's trip, we only lost 1 core, which saves a lot of time and stamina.

On Wednesday, I presented a workshop for the university's graduate students on giving feedback in the classroom, supporting students through effective feedback, and how and when to incorporate feedback as an educator. The workshop allowed me to talk about my master's thesis [on feedback], present some of my own research, and talk about what current educational and psychology papers suggest about using feedback in the classroom. I really value being able to use my background in teaching to help other graduate students who come from content area backgrounds and don't have much experience in education. And based on the feedback that I received, participants really liked having real world examples that were relevant to them as educators, as well as having the opportunity to learn about feedback in more depth than orientation workshops.

Which brings us to this week. This week I finished all of the winter samples that needed to be processed. In total, that means I have processed approximately 270 samples already from my research, with another 500+ to go--once I collect them, that is. However, since my next research trip is not until April, I am able to spend a few weeks doing more microplastics extractions. I have chemicals ready, my bin of samples is ready--as you can see--and I am really excited to getting into something new, because sometimes sample processing can be monotonous (especially after 270 samples). I cannot wait to bring you all along over the next few weeks to explain more about the microplastics extraction process, to show you what I see in the samples (preliminary data), and to talk about the next steps in the process.

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