Programs Blog

Wednesday, October 2, 2024

Location: SEA Campus, Woods Hole, MA

Weather: Clear

My name is Willow, and I am an Environmental Science major at Denison University in Ohio. I’m from the middle of Indiana, so it’s been really fun to experience living right next to the ocean for once in my life. I love being able to just bike to the beach on a whim any time I like. It’s been so fun to experience the ocean from land; I can’t wait to be surrounded by it in just a few days! 

We had our last Environmental Communication class today. To wrap it up we reviewed our ethics statement – how to report ethically on different cultures, and how to involve local peoples and cultures in the science that we will be conducting on their waters. It was a really great way to complete the threads we’ve been following throughout the semester. As a last note on the actual communication part we had in a guest lecturer who does professional data visualizations. I hadn’t realized how tricky of a process it is to move raw science into easy to read charts and graphs, so she had a lot of interesting things to say that I hadn’t thought about before. 

Then, after lunch, we had our final Nautical Science exam. I wouldn’t exactly say it went poorly, but I’m also not sure anyone should trust me to interpret the weather just yet. I’m sure after a few weeks we’ll all be masters at it though! I’ll probably need more like four weeks rather than two… And of course, after that we had our final Oceans in the Global Carbon Cycle class as well. We talked about the inevitability of climate change; very depressing but also very important. Ignoring it certainly hasn’t worked. And then we were done. No more classes – at least until we get to the ship. It’s been hard to say goodbye to our professors that we’ve gotten to know over the past month, but it’s also exciting to be moving on to the thing we’ve been studying so hard for.

The hardest goodbye, though, has been Raquel’s. There was a small gathering for her in A House tonight, and it drove in what an important part of our group will be missing. We’ll all miss you, Raquel! Our voyage won’t be the same without her kindness, empathy, and incredibly funny sense of humor. It just really stinks to leave without a shipmate. We will be bringing a photo of her onboard though, to make sure she can at least be there in spirit.