Possible Interview???

After all of my research so far, I am trying to start contacting people. So I thought that a good place to start is with a Marine Biologist named Janice Sessing, that I found on the Sea Grant: Marine Careers website. So right now I am hoping that she gets it and is able to reply. Other then that, I am still working on my proposal and am really not sure of what I should do next. I'm still working on it though, and hoping to get a response soon.

Internships and Volunteer Experience

Below are just a few links that have a lot of information regarding internships and other ways to get experience:
http://www.marineland.net/internship.php#nogo
http://www.whalecenter.org/intern.htm
http://www.dolphins.org/help_volunteer.php
http://www.vanaqua.org/education/aquafacts/marinemammaltrainer.html

Places to Look. . .

One of the places that looks really cool for an internship or even a job, is the Living Seas in Epcot, which is part of Disney World in Florida. They have a really neat program that would be really cool to look into, and possibly contact.

http://disney.go.com/disneyhand/environmentality/animals/ls_research.html

Good Advice

I got some really good advice from my mentor yesterday at my internship. She was talking about how hard it was to get a job in this line of work. Even with a Bachelors Degree and a lot of experience, you would have a hard time. She also mentioned that you have to look in the right spot. If you want to go into Marine Biology, you have to be willing to move to the coast. If you want to work with water animals, you have to move to where water animals are. Now a day, people need at least a Masters Degree and a lot of work and volunteer experience. That’s where a lot of people lose their edge. Going for a Master Degree or a PhD means more than ten years in college, and eventually you are going to realize that “Wait, I’ve been in school all of this time, I need to get a job.”Graduating from high school I will be eighteen, ten years after that, I will be almost thirty. That is the point when people get rooted to where they are (marriage, children, etc). One option many people make is going back to school to get their education degree, because you spent all of this time in college, and you can’t find a job in it, so you might as well teach what you’ve learned. What's cool about that is you can do your own research during that time and get your students to help you with the actual field research. So really what I’ve learned that I have to do next is look for schools that have the resources that will give me some sort of edge in the career field. That’s one of the things she said was the most difficult, looking around and actually finding out what you need to know from the people who have the resources and expertise to answer me fully. She even said she would look back for me into the different places that she was looking at when she was looking for a job to help me find people that I can email and/or interview. This is great, she has been a huge help.

New Foundation Questions

After I started going back to my sites and actually collecting the information they had, I came up with a lot of new foundation questions to go along with the things I was finding. Here is my new list:

1. What is Marine Biology?
2. How does one become a marine biologist?(high school prep)
3 How does one become a marine biologist?(college prep)
4. What advice do people in the field give students?
5. How is marine biology studied?
6. What is marine mammalogy?
7. What skills are necessary to study marine biology?
8. What is the history of marine biology?
9. What schools have good biology and marine biology programs?
10. What sorts of place hire marine biologists/mammalogist?

Did You Know. . . ?

-Oceans are 2.5+ miles deep, and contain 99.5% of Earth’s livable habitat
-Marine animals are one of the most understudied areas of research in the world
-Marine mammal science (marine mammalogy) is a smaller, more distinct area of marine biology
-Marine biology focuses on marine organisms and their relationship to their environment.
-Marine mammal science focuses on one or more specific marine mammals
-Marine biology has only been studied for about the last 35 years, with the development of technology
-Aristotle was the first to record marine life
-Scientists believe that aside from the thousands of marine species already discovered, over a thousand are believed to have not been discovered yet
-Many species of fish can change their sex
-The blue whale is the largest animal ever to live on earth, it had a heart the size of a car and blood vessels large enough for a full grown trout to swim through

Progress So Far . . .

Right now I am still working on my proposal, but Mrs. Savido keeps telling us that we have to have our "End" goal in mind. Well, if I do my project right, it won't have an official end. What I need to do now is figure who I want to interview and how I will do that. I have finally come up with a good way to sort my information out. I made a table with all of my information, and I am actually very happy with it.

Organization

I still can't think of a really good way to organize all of my information. Right now I think that I am going to go straight to putting all of the information into a table, and work out from there. After that, putting a PowerPoint will hopefully suffice for now.

The Proposal

Right now, I'm at a point in my proposal, where I think that I have everything, I checked it all offon a list, but I still feel like I am forgetting something. I asked Mrs. Savido to read it, and hopefully she will be able to point me in the right direction. The problem with my project is that we are supposed to be looking to what our final project will eventually become. As I said, the problem with my project is that it is not something that will actually have a final point that I can say, "Yes, I'm finished!" My final product would be a career, and that is something far past the scope of this class. Far past even graduating. So, for me it is a bit dofficult to plan out my steps, when a lot of this stuff takes time to actually work itself out.

Organizing Information

I think that I am almost done with my proposal. I just need to work through the process of organizing my information in a way that I can display it effectively. Right now I'm leaning towards a PowerPoint, but even still I feel like I am missing a step into making something of a "final product." Diagram, table, I don't know what will work the most effectively. "How to Organize a Career Plan " is what I could really use right now.

Proposal

Today is the first day that I started putting together my proposal. I don't think this will be to hard at all. Basically all I have to do is explain in a paper what the objective is, and how I plan to go about reaching that goal. I jsut need to organize my information in a way that I can effectively turn it into a paper with as little hassle as possible.

Even More Great Information

Today I did even more research. Moslty, I devoted my time to reading the articles that I was able to find on the Internet. I found a lot of awesome information and the DRC website and I found another awesome site called the Southwest Fisheries Science Center. The Q and A section answered alot of my questons and will shortly be added to my Resources List. I am extremely lucky that I am able to find some much information so easily. Next, I have to work on using the information that I find and putting it into the outline for my actual project topic.

http://swfsc.noaa.gov/textblock.aspx?id=54

Old Links

Today, what I did was go through all of my links and checked to see which ones would actually still be of relevence to my topic. I was lucky, because I only got rid of one link and I was able to replace it in no time. I found a site that was called the Dolphin Research Center. What's great about it though, is the fact that it talks about all types of animals and careers with them. This one will be much more beneficial to me then the other one was. After that I graded all of my links on a scale from one to ten. I am now pretty confident that I will find some good information from all of them. My next step is to find out which links answer which questions best.

Colleges and Universities

Right now I am trying to finid out which colleges and universities in the United States have good Biology and Marine Biology programs. On every single website that I have found, they say that you should NOT specialize in anyhitng to early. In the long run, as long as you have a degree in some general area of science, it will not matter later on. I personally want to major in Biology, possibly with a minor in Marine Biology or Zoology. Marine Biology is such a huge area of study, I don't want to get too specific too fast. Right now I am looking all over the internet to see what I can find so far I have found that University of California in San Diego, Hawaii Pacific, Duke, and CMU all have really great biology programs. After I get more information I will try to contact some of these places to see if they have any good information for me about their school's Biology or Marine Department. Actually, now that I think about it, I know Dr. Carrie Doonan who is a professor at CMU in the Biology Department, I would be able to contact her easily.

http://www.biology.duke.edu/undergrad/Contacts.html
http://www.cmu.edu/bio/undergraduate/studentlife/index.shtml

Yahoo Answers

When I was looking for some more information about colleges and universities today, I found a really good link to a question someone left on Yahoo Answers. The person asked if you could be a zoologist that specializes in Marine Animals. All of the answers that people left are actually really helpful and give a lot of good ideas about what to major in and so forth.

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080804083218AAEsBYT

"What is Marine Biology?" Picture

I'm happy to say that I finished my PhotoShop picture that best shows what Marine Biology is. If you look at the bottom of my Blog, you will see my photo. All of the animals that are in the picture are placed accurately in their habitat. For example, there is a jawfish hiding behind the "b" in biology, and that basically symbolizes that jawfish are not very aggressive animals, so they spend a lot of time hiding, away for more agressive animals. Another example, is the cleaner shrimp and the drangon wrasse near the "o" in biology. It is the cleaner shrimp's job to take dead skin and bacteria off of fish. In this, the cleaner shrimp gets a free meal and the wrasse gets cleaned off. This is called a symbiotic relationship.