Katie Skinker
Undergraduate fellow
Has this been your first research project of this level?
“This is definitely my first time doing fieldwork and research work as well. I've had internships in environmental science, but I was working in a lab that was wastewater treatment. You're not discovering anything or making your data, you're just making sure the water's getting cleaned.”
What is the inspiration behind your individual research project?
“One particular day it was so hot. We were just melting in the valley. We had a plot that was three pages long, so that's like 90 individuals [trees] in a plot and all of them were dead. I was doing the mapping and the recording, and Anna was measuring. Every time something would die, I would have to mark it on the map. It would say “New in census four” on the map, and then I'd mark it “Dead in census five.” Why is this happening? So much of a trend. Most things that had been alive before census four and were a little older, were totally fine. It was everything that had been new there. So I don't know what caused such a plague of those plants. That’s what inspired it.”
What would you say is something that you want to get out of this summer?
“I wanted to make connections with people who had shared ideas. I felt like I could learn a lot from them, not just what to study but also where I could go and how people live their daily lives, in a more sustainable way. Who could inspire me to be better myself.”