Internship #1

This morning I woke up at 6:20 and then got ready and I had eggs and cream of wheat. My mom first drove my brother to school and then from my brothers school I drove to USD with her in the car with me. There was actually a lot of traffic on our way to USD because there was a power shortage last night and all the lights were out. When I first got to USD I went to my mom's office because I had forgotten to bring one of the sheets of paper to get signed so I printed it out. I walked down to my internship site which is in the science building of USD. I went to the lab that I would be working in and I started to get set up with Katie, who is my mentors assistant.. my mentor is currently out of town. I am working in the science building and I am working in a lab on the main floor. The area that I work at is a lab table with a microscope. My mentor studies a species of marine life called fairy shrimp and I am helping pick out all the fairy shrimp cysts from the samples that were collected from the sites. I did that in the morning and in the afternoon after I came back from lunch. For lunch I made my own lunch and then I walked back to my mom's office to eat there. I'm hoping that sometime during internship I will be able to do a site visit with the college students and collect samples to be tested and such. I'm hoping that will happen at some time in the next couple weeks. HOPING FOR RAIN! If it rains then there is a chance that I will be able to go. I actually had some friends visit me after my first day of internship!!! I was so excited. My first day of internship was really good. I got the lay of the land and I know what I will be doing the next few weeks. My afternoon commute was very long. I fell asleep on the drive back home. End to a good day.



How is the recession impacting USD?
There has been a hiring and salary freeze among the employees and they are not raising the tuition which causes the freeze.

Where do you get your funding and how has that been effected?
The funding for USD comes from the tuition and donors of the school and it has been effected because there is less money among the donors and tuition is not going up so the funding is not increasing and actually decreasing a little bit as well.

Have their been cuts made to resources for the students in the university?
Although there are not as many positions to be filled among the campus, there surprisingly have been no cuts of resources for the students.

This is the entrance to the lab that I am working in. One of the strict rules is to not have any food or drinks inside so there is a little table to the left of the door where everyone keeps there drinks and food. The work schedule for the students that work in the lab is on the door and there is also some articles about the topic of study which is vernal pools and fairy shrimp. The door is ALWAYS locked which is  little frustrating sometimes when no one opens the door. haha. Most of the people in the lab listen to their ipods while working so the students usually cant hear someone knocking on the door. AND just about all the students who work have a key to get in.. where as I dont. So maybe I'm just the only one that gets locked out. haha. My mentors office is right down the hall way from her lab.

For my first day this is what I worked on. I worked on collecting cysts from the core sample that I was working on. I am to pull out all the intact ones as well as the broken ones and to also keep a tally of them. It's very tedious work to try and get every single cyst that is in the core sample. A dry weight is recorded, then going through the dirt to find all intact and broken cysts.. which is recorded as well. The vials which have the intact cysts in it are stored to be dried without the caps on.. and when they are done drying the cap is put on and the vials are stored for keeping data and possibly reintroducing the cysts back into the vernal pool they came in.. or putting the cysts in another vernal pool that doesnt have as many.