The start of something new

August 27th, 2012Blog0 comments

Katelyn Jenkins

by Katelyn Jenkins (College of William and Mary undergraduate)

My name is Katelyn Jenkins and I am a lab technician here at the Marine Biodiversity Lab at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science in Gloucester Point, Virginia. This year I will be a junior at the College of William and Mary where I am majoring in biology and minoring in marine science. As a local from Yorktown, Virginia, I have become fascinated with the environmental and economic importance of the world’s largest estuary just down the street – the Chesapeake Bay.

Katelyn checks experimental plots in the field

I became involved in research at VIMS during high school in 2008 where I worked in a Marine Conservation and Biology lab. Immediately immersed into field and laboratory work, I knew right away that marine science was a field I wanted to pursue. During 2009-2011 I began working on a research project at William and Mary that aimed to identify and characterize a harmful bacterium recently identified in striped bass in the Chesapeake Bay. Although the topic excited me, it wasn’t until I spent 2 years indoors running multiple PCR’s day after day in the lab that I knew I needed to get back into VIMS where I could study marine science on a much larger scale. In 2011, I began volunteering for Dr. Emmett Duffy in his Marine Biodiversity Lab where I learned to identify various types of seagrass, algae, and LOTS of what we affectionately call ‘bugs’ (small marine invertebrate grazers). Recently I put these new skills to the test when I returned to the lab to work as a technician for the summer.

Undergraduates Katelyn and Nicole prepare materials in the lab

This summer began on a busy note. I arrived at VIMS the day after I returned from a field course on the Eastern Shore. I had just enough time to unpack before I needed to repack my bags to head to Beaufort, North Carolina with our lab manager Paul Richardson to break down an experiment with the ZEN team at the University of North Carolina’s Institute of Marine Sciences (IMS). It was an exciting trip where I had the chance to meet and work with Erik Sotka and his lab group from the College of Charleston in South Carolina in addition to local NC graduate and undergraduate students. My first field experience with this lab group was an exciting one – there is a broad diversity of research projects and techniques employed in the ZEN. One of my favorite parts of the trip was having the chance to stay and work at IMS as well as learn about the ongoing research at this facility, as I have been thinking about potential graduate schools and programs to pursue after graduating from William and Mary.

Serena and Katelyn after a long day of fieldwork

After returning to VIMS, I have been involved in helping with many projects and picked up new skills: plumbing, sewing, processing chlorophyll samples, taking and sorting biomass cores, and preparing leaf tissue samples for CHN analysis. Although it may seem busy, it has forced me to become mentally organized with all of the different things going on in the lab – something that I think is a very important ‘life skill.’ I have also found that I have gained a lot of confidence in my abilities to recognize what needs to be done, when it needs to be completed by, and what needs to be done to have it completed. There’s a lot more to science than just doing research. I’ve learned that the planning, management and constant juggling of tasks is just as important as actually processing samples.