Programs Blog

Date: May 31, 2025

Time: 2100

Location: Gump Marine Station, Mo‘orea

Weather: 74˚ F, 10 kts southeasterly

Below is an excerpt from an interview with Gabi Carttar, Barnard College

What happened at the Marine Biodiversity and Conservation Student Symposium earlier today?

We’ve all been preparing these presentations over just the last two days—which is kind of crazy. After finishing our papers, we got to spend this time putting the presentations together, workshopping them, getting feedback from our peers and (professor) Sarah and (postdoc) Kayla. Today, we all gathered in the Gump Marine Station classroom, and we got to share with each other the final polished versions of our findings, and share with our friends and family (over Zoom) and with those awesome people who came to watch us in person.

It was something I was so nervous for, for such a long time leading up to this—ever since the first day we talked about this symposium as our final end goal back in Woods Hole. It seemed like it was going to be such a scary thing, but it was just such a supportive environment, knowing that all of our friends and family were watching from afar. And then getting to see some of our shipmates come back to watch us (the professional crew, who took a ferry on their day off to get here). I just felt so supported and so happy! We got to present about the research we completed, and I felt so lucky. And well prepared. It went much differently than I had built it up in my head to be.

Could you share a moment from your time at sea when you thought, I’m really learning right now?

About a week in, when things were really crazy and we were just getting totally tossed around by the first gale, everything seemed so far out of our comfort zones. So hard. So much information that it seemed impossible that we’d be able to grasp it all enough, that we’d be running the ship in just a couple weeks. Jackie (third mate) was talking to us, and she said something along the lines of “We’re going to encounter a lot of difficult moments here. We can’t get out of it, so we might as well get into it.” That was just something that I felt that all of us took so, so to heart. It’s something that we’ve been reflecting on a lot, too. There was no bad thing that could possibly happen to us, because even the bad things, were really just actually good things. Like having a hard day would turn into a story you talk about, and you laugh about two days later. It all just turns into something amusing, y’know? The bad things were good things, and the good things were good things. Having that mindset that the challenges we were facing were just moments to embrace, not things to be scared of or to dread. This made everything so joyful.

World Oceans Day is coming up next week, Sunday the 8^th  of June. Over the course of the semester, what has changed in terms of your thinking about the importance of the ocean?

I feel like in the way that 1 is infinitely larger than 0. It all feels impossible to quantify how much the way I think about the ocean has changed over the course of this semester. Not that it wasn’t something that I didn’t care or hadn’t thought about, but just for the path my life has taken so far the ocean was kind of a distant concept. As a place, as a system, it was something I knew conceptually was important, but now it just feels like the ocean is maybe at the center of everything. There isn’t like a single important process ecologically or socially that you couldn’t draw back to the ocean in some way. And on top of all that intellectual care for the ocean, it was really just so special to be able to spend that time at sea. The ocean really became our home.