Programs Blog

Tuesday October 1, 2024 

Location: SEA Campus, Woods Hole, MA

Weather: 66°F, Partially Sunny 

Hi, I’m Claire Lee. I’m originally from Washington, DC, but I go to school at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. I’m a biology major and an environmental studies minor there, and I’ve always been pretty interested in marine sciences (although there’s not a whole lot of marine in Minnesota). I applied to this program because I knew the hands-on experience would help me really figure out if marine conservation is something I want to do with my life. It’s been awesome working with this group of people through all our classes, and I couldn’t have asked for better people to do this program with. 

Today (let’s pretend I wrote this on time) was a big day, because we were presenting our individual oceanographic research projects. These are the big scientific research things we’re going to be doing once we get down to the Caribbean. For example, my question is about how sponge cover affects overall reef health, since we learned about how some coral reefs may be turning into sponge reefs thanks to global climate change. 

There were a lot of people who showed up for our presentations, which were each about 12 minutes long. Our professors were all there, as well as Mr. Wigglesworth (the president, and the most active in the Q&A sections), our program assistant, our reef tech, our academic dean, and some other people zoomed in. The presentations went really well. Alongside our respective research questions, we each talked about the actual places we’d be going to (stay tuned for future blogs for our experiences there!), how we would be collecting data for our project (stay tuned for that too), and what the implications of our research would be. 

It’s the last week before we leave for the Caribbean, and everything on shore up here is coming to a close. There’s still lots of work left to do, but it’s hard to not look ahead to our departure on the 9th (Leandro leaves early but that’s ok we still love him). 

Before I go, I’d like to shout out my friends, both up at school in Minnesota, as well as those studying abroad right now. I love you all, and I can’t wait to see you again and tell everyone about my whole semester! Shout out to my family, especially my little brother Marcus who just started college this semester at William and Mary! And of course, a wonderful shout out to everyone here making this semester as fun and interesting as it has been (and I hope it will continue to be down in the Caribbean section). Lastly, I want to tell my girlfriend, down in Valparaiso, Chile, that she’s amazing and I love her, and I can’t wait to see her once we both finish our semesters! 

Signing out for now, 

Claire