My Oregon Trail: 1st Lab Meeting

Thursday, I had my first lab meeting with my boss, her adviser (our boss), the other intern, and some other people from OSU in Corvallis. Okay, let me start off by saying...wow. This was serious, and this was intimidating and overwhelming for me. This is how Thursday went for me. I did a repro plot from 515-600 a.m., then drove 3 hrs to Newport. We had a 2 hour meeting. Okay, in this meeting we all went around and talked about what is going on with our project and more particularly at our site. So, I had to introduce myself to everyone, tell them where I'm located, and anything of interest that has happened at my site. So, of course I told them about my only two bald eagle disturbances from two weeks ago. Okay, that part was fine. What I failed to mention is that for this meeting, we all got sent a scientific paper that has to do with predator-prey interactions. They sent it to us the day before the meeting. They wanted us to read the paper, and make notes to discuss it at the meeting. Um....okay. So, we weren't privileged enough to read scientific papers in any of my science classes. In fact, these papers were never really mentioned. So, I had to read a paper that I'm unfamiliar with its style from the 50's, and be able to understand it enough to discuss it. Ahem..okay. Yeah, well let's be serious. I just made notes the whole time my two bosses discussed the paper, and tried to figure out how to apply it to our project. This is all great, but I've just never been a part of something like this before. I can't think of one single job/internship/experience biology and non-biology related where they have wanted me to be so involved. I was soooo mentally unprepared for this. LOL. I just was like, wait....you care what I think??? Oohhhh....okay. Now I know. We will have lab meetings once a week, and once a month we will read a paper and discuss it.

After our meeting, me, my two bosses, and the other intern, Sheena went to lunch at a local cafe. Once we were done with lunch, Cheryl and Sheena went to Cheryl's spot to train Sheena on repro plots. I had planned on attending a seminar about, I don't know, something...haha. But, Cheryl had forgotten the mount for her scope, so I went out there and worked on repro plots with them. Man, I felt spoiled. Cheryl's rock is SOO much closer to her spot than mine is. It was soo fun being out there. We even got to climb up the lighthouse. I realize that lighthouse's aren't very critical anymore due to technology, but historically they are important. And history=awesome. Here are some of the pics I took with my phone (forgot my camera) while up in the lighthouse. It is 8 stories high, 104 steps, and it's light can be seen up to 22 miles away.