Student Stories - Living among the fish

I’m Amy Markel. I’m a biology major with a marine option. I’m a sophomore, and we’re at the Oregon Coast Aquarium right now. I’m a volunteer diver, so every third Saturday of the month, I come, and help clean the tanks and make sure the health of the organisms and fish in there It’s awesome. It’s quiet. They’re all around you. They can sense that you’re there. Sometimes they get really curious and they like to come up and say hi, and it’s just cool. It’s surreal because you’re in their home, and you get to visit for just this little glimpse. I received the NOAA Holings scholarship, it’s a program that will award me 8,000 dollars for next year and 8,000 dollars for the year after. It will also include a 10-week internship in the Summer of 2012 I’ve a really huge passion for sea turtle ecology, I’m really interested in the impacts of that ecology on fisheries as well. How they interactions can affect how well fisheries are doing. I really would like to be able to just observe these organisms in their natural habitat so I can really just see exactly how everything is working. Well, Oregon State has been great so far, the science is really rigorous and I believe that it’s given me tools to use so that I can translate this data into messages for the general public so they can understand what I see when I look at these interactions.