Week Two - a week in the life

Things have definitely started picking up this week here in Astoria. Everyone started breathing again after the site visit on Monday and the real work of the summer seems to have begun. There are several things I’m working on currently, besides my daily duties of helping out with station upkeep. In addition to gathering metadata on the stations I have been told to start learning about CMOP’s database and how to update it. This means learning about network interactions and the computer language PHP. I’m fairly inept with computers so it’s still mostly gibberish, but I’m hoping I’ll be able to learn as I go. I’m also working on learning some boat skills so I can get my Oregon boating certification and maybe drive our extravagant, 18 ft, partially inflatable R/V vessel.

As for my daily duties, I spent most of Wednesday shuttling researchers and interns from the Portland labs to and from their sampling sites. It was pretty neat to see their sampling process, but I realized science doesn’t stop when the sun goes down. Some of the scientists were up until midnight waiting for their incubating samples to be done. Thankfully, I didn’t need to stay up with them. Thursday was a fairly easy day. I went with the other interns into Portland to tour the OHSU main campus. It was interesting to see the labs where a lot of research actually gets done. Also, the tram ride was totally worth it. Today, my job is to reassemble our Niskin water sampling bottle and then we’ll go out to the Desdemona station to assemble an antenna. <