Our Students Do Arts and Crafts

I am happy to announce that I successfully defended my dissertation, and I was given the title of Doctor. After five years (or four and a half because this academic year isn't over) of working on my project, developing my dissertation, collecting and analyzing data, and interpreting and writing a lot of information, I have completed my journey. Although I defended this week, I still have a semester to finish [teaching] and I need to make some edits to my dissertation before I send it to the university for final approval.

This week the students started their independent projects at the marine lab, and these projects will run for the next 5-6 weeks. Prior to this point, the students made observations about the organisms at the lab and their behaviors, read primary literature to learn more about what they observed, and proposed (both written and orally) an independent project to address a question raised by their research efforts. These projects concern a range of organisms, types of experiments (observational, choice/behavioral, manipulated treatments), and levels of complexity, but ultimately the students will spend the next few weeks monitoring their experiments, collecting the data, and learning how to interpret the data and present their findings. 

Since this course is one of the many experimental biology sections in our department, the students are expected to give multiple oral presentations and write multiple reports to meet the oral and written competency requirements. Their final written reports will be their manuscripts, as if the students were submitting their work for publication, and they will give another oral presentation discussing their findings and interpreting their results. Today, however, they needed to create settlement plates, experimental chambers, salinity treatments, and some needed to rethink their experimental design based on feedback we provided. The students learned how much arts and crafts happen behind the scenes of science experiments, as they drilled holes into materials, attached rocks to strings to weigh down their materials in the water, and created plaster casts to measure their response variables. Pictured here is a student's project in the early stages of development, as they weighed these ascidians to standardize all the treatments by the weight of the organisms to reduce confounding factors in their experiment. They will use photographic analysis of the water column in their treatment tanks to evaluate the feeding efficiency of these organisms under different conditions. 

Next week there will not be a blog, as it is Spring Break, so I won't have any updates, but stay tuned because I'm hoping the following week to have some great pictures from the experimental treatments that were placed into the water today.

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