The Scientist

Two years ago I held my breath as I sent an email to an address I didn’t know, but was listed as a contact for a project called TIDE. I closed my eyes, pressed “send,” and seconds later heard a ding–which turned out to be an automated message letting me know that the email address was no longer in use.

Several messages and a few meetings later, I found myself stumbling down a forest path and spit suddenly into what I would come to think of as one of my favorite places in the world. Spartina patens spread out before me and wind turbines in the distance, I, now dubbed a TIDE Project Intern, followed my mentors into the marsh to learn as much as I could during my twice-monthly field visits.

That summer took a lot, but it gave a lot, too. I remember showing up at Marshview afraid that I wouldn’t be good enough for the position, half-believing that I wasn’t fit to be a scientist. I beat myself up over the smallest mistakes and expected myself to be perfect at every turn. I set such high standards for myself that I managed to make it harder to take in all that was going on around me–creating the only real roadblock in my learning process.

I managed, however, to learn a whole lot despite accidentally holding myself back. When I looked back after what I thought would be the end of my time with TIDE, I remembered learning how to program finnickey automatic water samplers, running benthic algal samples using UV Spectrophotometry, and sampling for plant biomass during the Annual Harvest. These were processes that I couldn’t define when I began, let alone master–and, in the end, I felt confident that I could take these skills and apply them to wherever I went next.

It’s a good thing I didn’t go too far!

Now, two and a half field seasons later, the person I was when I began working with TIDE is almost easy to forget. I’ve been lucky enough to train a handful of other TIDE interns over the last summer and a half, and am constantly in awe of how they each adapt to their new, slightly more salty, environment. Already they filter with swift precision and jump into creeks as if they’ve been doing so for years, yet sometimes I see an inkling of my former self in them. I love teaching them and hope to help them understand, if not only the science itself, that they are beyond capable of being what we call a “scientist”–no matter what they (or society) may believe.

And I am grateful that my TIDE journey gets to continue.

– Katie Armstrong (Summer Research Assistant, Woods Hole Research Center)