The Begining of the next chapter of My Life

This is the beginning of the next chapter in my life. I just graduated high school and got this great opprotunity to do this internship with Wendy Smythe. Well, At first i got a chance to go with wendy to a river nine miles out of my home town Hydaburg, Alaska called Soda Bay. I really had no i dea what we were doing but it was something to do in the small Village of Hydaburg. So we drove out to the trail, hiked down to the mouth of the river and collected samples. Then she went and did her thing with the samples and i went on with my regular high school life. Later on, I got another chance to go to an AISES conference in Portland, Oregon and of course I took the chance and went because I had NEVER been to the lower 48 states. That was an amazing conference becasue there I met Vanessa and I guess her and Wendy were talking before this and Wendy wanted me to do this internship and for her to be my mentor.
As I was coming up to the end of the beginning of my life (high school), I applied to be an intern for CMOP, hoping i would get it. Excitingly, I got an email from Vanessa telling me I go the internship. I was VERY excited along with a lot of other community members because I was the only graduate at Hydaburg High School of 2010 and was already getting a great opprotunity. That was how I got this amazing opprotunity. I was full of emotions weeks before I left Hydaburg. I was excited, nervous, and scared to do this internship. I say scared because it is the first time being away from home in that extended amount of time, Excited because it will bring other opprotunities and a good experience and nervous because I had never been on my own, I always had my mom, brother, and three other sisters with me, so as this week went by i got home sick and wanted to be home with my friends and family. As the week went on i had more stuff to do and got more familiar with Beaverton, Oregon. Thank you to everyone that made this amazing opprotunity possible for me.
 

WEEK 1

• On Monday, I did orientation with Vanessa and the other interns. I introduced myself as well as the other interns. We all had lunch together and visited. After lunch, Wendy toured Jared and I around the lab and a bunch of other rooms we will use. At three o' Clock we were going to do a safety training but that was rescheduled for next week.
• On Tuesday, I read over materials Wendy had readay for me. After a couple hours of reading over the materials I went to lunch at Whole Some Foods with Eduan (a fellow intern). After lunch I read some more. Then at three-thirty i watched Wendy do her presentation on what she does.
• On Wednesday, I read over more materials in my folder until eleven-thirty. At that time Wendy went over what we will be doing in the next ten weeks. After that I went to Panda Express for lunch with Wendy. we got back at two o' clock and went over the microscope on what to do and what not to do. Which was important to me because that is what i will be working with for the next few weeks. Around four-thirty, Wendy had me write a summary of what we will teach at the Hydaburgs Culture Camp in July and get the tides for our trip to Soda Bay.
• On Thursday, wendy had me doing DNA extrations with Jared. Jared was showing me the steps to extract DNA. Then later, Wendy quickly showed me what we just did with her sample.
• On Friday, I attended a lab meeting with everyone in Brad Tebo's Lab. They discussed a poster Brad is taking to his Gordon conference. At eleven o' clock I attended a thesis defence on a version of herpes with Wendy and Jared. At twelve i attended the first brown bag seminar of the summer with Vanessa and the other interns. The seminar was about ethics and academic integrity. After the brown bag seminar Vanessa had the interns that wanted to attend the Saturday Market in Portland, Oregon on sunday stay to tell us when we will leave to attend this. After that, I went to the lab and watched Jared do more DNA extrations.

That was the first week of the CMOP Intership for me.=D