What Happens Outside of the Lab

Some weeks I do more work outside of the lab than I do while at the lab, and this was/is one of those weeks. This past week I met with groups of students who are interested in getting involved in research at Florida State through our school's Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP). The program allows first and second year students the opportunity to conduct research in a variety of settings across FSU, and the coordinators invite professors, post-doctoral scholars, and graduate students to submit projects that undergraduates can work on. After presenting at the round table this week, I have started meeting individually with students who are interested in getting involved in my microplastics project, and I am excited for the opportunity to increase undergraduate participation in research since it can make a huge impact on their future endeavors.

I have also been analyzing data from my own work for a research presentation that I will be giving tomorrow. The FSU Ecology and Evolution Research Discussion Group (EERDG) hosts weekly talks where graduate students present on any topic of interest. It is a place for us to practice seminar talks, ask for advice on research methods, and talk about non-research topics, such as mental health, scientific writing, careers, and grant opportunities. My favorite part of the talks is that there is no pressure or stress associated with the presentations, so many of the graduate students (myself included) cater our talk toward a more humorous presentation of information, rather than the traditional seminar talk. This week I chose to include plenty of jokes about the world's plastic and the sad reality of how large corporations treat plastic recycling, in the hopes of providing some levity to the serious issue of microplastics pollution. I unfortunately can't include any pictures of the presentation here because (1) the memes are copyrighted, and (2) the data is unpublished so I cannot share it yet.

My hope is that within the next year I will finish the first section of this research and present it at a conference and/or send it for publication in a journal so that I can share everything I have been doing with a broader audience.

In a few weeks I will be talking about what is coming up in October that is super important and will mean a few weeks hiatus from posting, but until then I will continue to show some great pictures from my research and tell more stories about what I am learning from the Panama City Beach sediments.