Looking Back and Looking Forward
Well, I just stood in front of a poster and answered questions about it for 90 minutes, which I guess means that the Howard Hughes Research Fellows program has come to an end. Sometimes the eight weeks dragged on and sometimes they flew by, but now they’re over, and it’s time for me to move on to the rest of the summer and to my next year of school.
I still have two blog topics left to write about, so for the sake of convenience (which really means laziness), I’ll put them into the same post. First I’ll reflect on the experience: Overall, I enjoyed it. I learned a lot about the techniques of field ecology and how an ecology lab works. I also learned a lot about the principles of ecology, but not quite as much as I’d expected. I guess that’s what courses are for. What I didn’t expect to learn a lot about were other fields of biology, but with the seminars, the chalk talks, the poster session, and my interactions with other people in the program, I learned about biology at all sorts of levels, and I got a sense of the multitude of techniques used to study it. I suppose if I could change one thing about the program, it would probably be the amount of responsibility I had in my lab. I never felt that the whole project was riding on my shoulders, but sometimes I felt like a good chunk of it was, and that could get a bit overwhelming. Still, with less responsibility, it’s doubtful I would have learned as much. I guess the quickest way to learn to swim is to jump into the deep end. Just as long as you don’t drown.
I didn’t drown in my lab, and if I dive into research as a career, it’s unlikely that I’ll drown there either. I’m still not sure I want to do that, though. I know I want to work with environmental conservation, but that’s a field that can be approached many different ways. In that sense, it’s a lot like the field of medicine. If you study medicine, you can go into a career that deals with finding new information (i.e. biomedical research), you can go into a career that applies information to real-world problems (i.e. becoming a doctor), or you can do some combination of the two. It’s the same with conservation, and I still haven’t decided whether I’m interested in research, application, or both. The Howard Hughes program gave me a good idea of what ecological research looks like, and I like the way it looks, but do I really want to make it my career? I have no idea right now, but thankfully I have a long time to decide, or at least I think I do. As I learned from the past eight weeks, what at first seems like forever can actually go by in no time. It feels like it’s just begun, and then, in the blink of an eye, it’s over.
