Field Season Time!

For most biology graduate students, summer means trips and extended stays because of field season. This week, I wanted to talk briefly about what a field season entails (even though I don't have a field season), what summer is generally like as a graduate student in our department, and highlight some science resources if you are interested in learning more about field work or other areas of science.

Field seasons, aptly named because they are the [usually] three months when scientists are at their research sites conducting field work, often happen in the summer in graduate school. During the academic year, most of our graduate students are teaching assistants for undergraduate courses, so they are required to be close enough to campus to attend lectures and/or run laboratory classes. While some of our students have research assistantships during the academic year, most assistantships take place during the summer. A research assistantship (RA) is a paid opportunity to conduct research, and removes a student from their teaching responsibility for a semester or longer. Some students have multiple semester/year RAs because of major projects they are working on with their advisors, while other students do not have internal opportunities to secure RAs for various reasons. While our department offers a select number of these paid research opportunities, the competition is incredibly tough because all of the graduate students in our department are brilliant and have interesting and unique research questions. The departmental RAs, however, are summer-only, which is why the summer is often field season time for our biologists. Those students with RAs use the entire summer for research, which is quite necessary, given the number of students whose field sites are outside of Tallahassee/the Marine Lab.

For students with less robust field seasons, more localized research areas, or no field season at all, summer often brings a balance between a teaching assistantship and research. Some of my peers teach early in the week so that they have the rest of the time for research, while others like to spread out their tasks. This balancing act can be quite reasonable, depending on the research tasks students have planned, and when I am planning my schedule (research and teaching), I figure out what research tasks I am trying to accomplish and I try to move my teaching schedule around my research to create an efficient plan. If I am lucky, I can get an RA and spend more of my time at the lab working on time-intensive projects, like I will this summer. 

This summer, I will be working on two time-intensive parts of my research. The first is identifying nematodes that I found in the St. Andrews Bay sediments from part 1 of my dissertation. I have never done nematode identifications so it will be a unique learning process and I will spend much of my summer in front of the microscope, flipping through visual guides to identify approximately 2,400 microscopic animals. Then, at the end of the summer I will be starting one of the more exciting parts of my research, which is an experiment to see how organisms respond to microplastics in their natural environment. I will talk more about both of these sections of my research as I get further along in the processes. However, I do want to end by providing you all with some wonderful science resources for the extra curious. I mentioned field seasons at the beginning and you can learn all about the research that our field scientists are doing by following along on their journeys. Our ecology and evolution graduate group at FSU has an instagram page that highlights individual students (www.instagram.com/eerdgfsu/), you can check out individual labs at the university from the biology research page (www.bio.fsu.edu/index-research.php), or--even better--you can come visit us this Saturday from 10-3 at the FSUCML Open House (marinelab.fsu.edu/outreach_education/special-events/open-house/). I hope to see you there!