This week we talk to Middlebury students who are engaging in exciting internships across the country and abroad. Read more about their adventures below:
Annie Taylor ’16 and Casey Harlow ’16
Santa Cruz Island, California
Annie Taylor ’16 and Casey Harlow ’16 are spending their Winter term hiking all over Santa Cruz Island off the coast of California, religiously searching the remote island for one species in particular: the Bishop pine tree. Taylor, a Biology major and a California native, is spending her year long thesis investigating the spatial pattern of Bishop pine mortality on Santa Cruz Island; in other words, she aims to understand where and why the pine is dying and to map its future distribution, especially in the light of California’s recent devastating droughts.
Harlow, an International Politics and Economics major, accompanied Taylor to Santa Cruz Island, after the Nature Conservancy, which owns the majority of the unpopulated island, suggested it would be unsafe for Taylor to conduct her research alone. While on the island, Harlow is personally investigating how the Bishop pine tree is surviving depending on fence lines.
Together, both women spend their days driving the skinny, dirt island roads, hiking to reach secluded stands of pine trees, marking trees with their GPS units and collecting data. They are staying on a small ranch, leftover from the days when the island was covered in sheep and managed by cowboys. In the evenings, they help Jay, the ranch manager and the only other person currently on the island, with small chores around the ranch.
“I feel very lucky to be able to spend time in this beautiful place, especially because I am not a scientist or a big donor for the Nature Conservancy,” said Harlow. “This project has really allowed me to study something new and take advantage of a liberal arts education.”
Joanna Balla ’18
Columbia Heights, D.C.
An aspiring teacher, literary studies major Joanna Balla ’18 has been spending her days surrounded by three and four-year-olds at the AppleTree Institute, a Public Charter Pre-school located in Columbia Heights, D.C.
Even though the classroom can quickly become hectic and difficult to manage, Balla says she loves the challenge. “I’ve had a passion for education from an early age and it has been so rewarding to start putting these dreams into action by actually spending time working in the classroom. I’m learning so much about classroom control and behavior management from the awesome team of teachers they have.”
Apart from leading activities for the children, Balla notes that one of the most difficult – yet fulfilling – parts of her internship has been working alongside kids with learning disabilities.
For Balla, the greatest joy comes from seeing the small glimmers of progress in her students. “Some of the students that I work with are struggling especially with basic skills such as letter recognition and [simple] tasks such as counting to 10. It is really rewarding to get that rare one-on-one time with the kids and start to see progress even in the short whole that I have been here.”
Christopher Diak ’18.5
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Amidst the lab benches of the Rapoport Laboratory at Harvard Medical School, neuroscience major Christopher Diak ’18.5 is hard at work purifying an “endoplasmic reticulum associated” protein that has been linked to multiple neurodegenerative diseases. The end goal of the Rapoport Team’s research is to discern the precise chemical structure of the protein and to make hypotheses to “see how its pathway works.”
As most of his work takes place at the microscopic level, Diak still marvels at the way in which the smallest of molecules can have such great physiological effects. “I love this work because I am learning to see neurodegenerative disease in terms of the tiniest movements of molecules. It is amazing to think that if we can just make some proteins better at the jobs, we could prevent immense suffering.”
Although the scientific method works on the premise of a strictly defined set of controlled conditions, Diak says that each day in the lab is anything but predictable. Interestingly enough, a crucial part of scientific research consists of eliminating the ways in which things do not work in order to figure out how the actual mechanism functions.
“A typical day involves lots of optimizations – experiments never run the way you want them to the first or second (or [even] eighth) time, so we look at the data from the last experiment and use what we know to tweak our approach.”
Diak, however, is not disappointed when experiments fail. “Even on days when the proteins crash I leave the lab having learned or accomplished something important. The value of an experience like that can’t be overestimated.”
Jiya Pandya ’17
Washington, D.C.
Along with a cohort of three other Middlebury College students, Jiya Pandya ’17 is in midst of completing a four-week long internship in Washington, D.C. A history major at the College, Pandya notes that the internship is a perfect complement to her age-long love for “working with old artifacts and documents.”
“The Smithsonian itself is a incredible institution, and being a part of it, even for a month, seemed not only like a great way to connect with history, but also to see how public history organizations work in the real world.”
Besides being able to access the brimming archives of a world-class institution, Pandya says that her experience at the museum also sheds light upon the incredibly powerful social impact that the organizations such as the Smithsonian have on the public.
By “thinking critically about [issues of] public history, power, control, privilege, and identity,” Pandya says that her internship has given her the invaluable opportunity to engage firsthand in the behind-the-scenes conversations that collectively determine which particular artifacts museum-goers see when they make a trip to the Smithsonian.
“Our supervisor at the museum – who works with disability history – really pushes us to question and think about the reasons why certain histories are displayed, while others are not. She has been encouraging and teaches me how to be a better activist in a field where having an impact is very much about [finding ways to engage] with an audience to educate them about alternative ideas and affirm their own emotions.”
Kate Bauman ’16
Prince Edward Island, Canada
Ever wonder how new medicines and antibiotics are discovered? These days scientists mostly find new drugs by analyzing microbes from remote corners of the planet, like secluded caves and the bottom of the ocean. For Winter Term, Kate Bauman ’16 is joining this hunt for novel antibiotics by analyzing microbic samples from Antarctica in a laboratory at the University of Prince Edward Island in Prince Edward Island, Canada. She will be accompanied by Assistant Professor of Chemistry/Biochemistry Lesley-Ann Giddings. Bauman’s findings will be part of her thesis, the subject of which is “Exploiting cryptic gene clusters for the discovery of bioactive secondary metabolites.”
Bauman is traveling to Prince Edward Island so that she can collaborate with Dr. Russell Kerr. Kerr has the Arctic counterparts to Bauman’s Antarctic samples so collaboration between them will allow a comprehensive look at extremophilic microorganisms—tiny organisms that live in the most extreme environments on earth—from both poles. 50 percent of drugs approved by the FDA in the last thirty years have been from natural products like extremophilic microorganisms.
Bauman, who will be in PEI for two weeks, hopes to hike in the Prince Edward Island National Park when she is not working on her research.
J-Terming Across the Continent
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