Doing What's Necessary

At USC I have learned a lot about myself and what I love. I have worked very hard to be where I am today and taking every opportunity possible. I have built a solid foundation with my time here and building to bigger and better things. I have given myself such a diverse set of skills simply just off of enthusiasm for what I love and what I do. My skills have grown from a mixture of work experience and classes. Where I sit now, I feel is a culmination of what I know how to do and how to branch out and try new things. Sometimes, you just have to do things you do not always enjoy to get to what you like. Take the hard math courses to get to the fun marine science class.

 

Through the different marine science courses, which are all very statistic-heavy, that teach various types of statistics through R coding. Through USC my program has us take a high-level stats course that works in R code teaching the basics and then going very in-depth into how to do statistical analysis. Being able to run these statistics is very important to look at data sets and analyze data. This directly pertains to research because without this skill you would not be able to critically think through the issues and data. You have to critically think through your research questions to formulate good answers. My various labs and my statistics class helped teach me how to analyze and what it truly means to critically look at data. 

 

I recently started a new position as an intern at Coastal Science and Engineering which is a consultancy agency. They mostly work with dune projects, beach restoration, and sand relocation projects. Every week is a new thing. One week I could be sitting at a computer crunching numbers and running statistical analysis I learned in my stats course. Another week could be doing lab work analyzing sand samples which utilizes all the lab skills that I have gained through various courses. One week I got to play around with some acid for shell dissolution. It is sometimes very tedious work and other times the work is intensive and needs more attention. Sometimes it’s just sitting at a computer for hours and other times it's sitting in a lab for hours. 

 

I am learning many valuable, transferrable skills such as working in global mapper. One of the biggest things I have done so far in my time at Coastal Science is digitize these various maps from Charleston Harbor. Very tedious point-by-point depth profile. It required placing a point on every elevation assigning a value to every point. Each map had anywhere between 3000-4000 points. Then I created a depth profile chart and contours of the depths.  This was done for five maps from the 1800’s. But it is a skill that will transfer to other jobs.

 

 I have also learned how to use Excel very adequately. One of my days I spent in Excel making graph after graph based off of data from ANOVA’s I created. An ANOVA is just a statistical analysis used to compare two types of data together. I learned how to run ANOVAs through my Stats 515 course and various lab classes. I have learned to do them both by hand and through code. The ANOVA works by creating a comparison between two data locations to see if they are statistically similar or different. It can show a trend across locations and data sets. I feel like I am an Excel master now with everything I did.

 

I have only been in my internship for about two months, but I have already learned so much about myself. I learned I like variability in my work life. I like to walk into something new every day and not the same thing over and over again. I have learned I do not always enjoy desk work. I have also learned how to cope with copious desk work. 

 

Through my time thus far I have taken away many lessons. Such as sometimes you have to do things you do not always enjoy to get to where you want to be or to get to the fun parts. I have sort of felt that way about my whole career, like taking basic general education courses as a means to an end. Sometimes you have to do things to move forward in life. Work a job you may not always enjoy just to make ends meet, to fuel a dream to move on in life. Use a job as a stepping-stone to get yourself further in life. It can make things seem more bearable in life. Shows you are making progress towards your goals, even if it is not how you imagined it. Life likes to throw some curve balls at you sometimes, and you just have to swing and hope you nail it. 

 

Connecting back to research, these skills are important to analyze data. You must critically think through your data and find solutions. You must also analyze the data through various forms of analysis. It could be through statistics or simply just explaining why something came out the way it did. In my own research, I have to critically think through the results to see why something came out the way it did. It could be because of an error in a code or software or could just be I picked poor data. It all ends up being useful regarding research.