Hello everyone! Jess and Taylor here, reporting to you after our work day! The day started at 7:30 AM today, with French toast and mini sausage links for breakfast. After breakfast, we gathered in the classroom to discuss our plans for the day. There were gray skies and thunder that could be heard in the distance. This prevented some of the research groups from going out to collect their last set of data from Sand Dollar Bay. Instead, the groups were given class time to work on their research projects or organism presentations. Many took advantage of this time to clean up their research project areas, work on posters, and begin studying for our final exam. Lucky both of our groups were done with research and we were able to spend the time perfecting our organism projects since both of our groups were presenting tonight.
Lunch today was a favorite for everyone – chicken sandwiches. They were served with potato salad, spaghetti, apple pie, and orange Kool-Aid. After lunch, the skies cleared up, the sun was shining, and some of our research groups headed out to Sand Dollar Bay to do their research. While some counted and analyzed corals, others searched for flamingo tongues. The groups who stayed behind in the lab worked on rehearsing for their organism presentation, data analysis of research results and creating graphs for their research project poster. Our groups worked on our results and graphs section for our research project poster. As the gathering of data for research projects came to an end, we all realized how few days we have left at the GRC.
For dinner we had salad, bread, pork chops, corn, spinach, rice, curry, macaroni and cheese casserole, and another favorite of many – chocolate cake. We had about an hour after dinner of free time. Some took this time to do laundry, go to the library to chat with family and friends, and others came back to the classroom to continue their work with their groups.
Class time tonight was used for organism presentations. The plant group and the fish group were up to present. Jess’s group, the plant group went first and then Taylor’s group, the fish group, went next. While both groups did very well and had very informative presentations, the fish group made it memorable by including sarcasm and jokes to help the class better learn their organisms. Once the presentations were done, the entire class headed to the snack bar to get treats and allow the professors time to mark the organisms we will need to know for the final on the posters made by each organism group. This began the period of studying for some, while others decided to end the night with a movie in the air conditioned conference room to escape the bugs. This was a day of recovery after swimming to the wall and a day of rest before our all day adventure tomorrow!
Jessica Dickson ’19 and Taylor Owens ‘18