Between geeking out on cool wildlife and answering random questions with the forest team during morning stretches, Annie is enjoying her time as an undergraduate fellow.

I really love lunches. I'll be with friends or family afterwards and they'll say “oh, what was your favorite part of the day?” And I always want to say “lunches” because it's just so fun. I love the work we're doing, but it's fun to to hear about people's days and hear what they're like outside of work too. And the stretches are always nice, just learning little facts about people, like what they would name their dragon if they could have one.

What inspires you about science?

The town I'm from floods a lot, so when I was in high school, we would get flood days instead of snow days because our school would be flooded. So,I would help out in the town with filling sandbags, getting people out of their homes and stuff. Science inspires me because there’s a way to solve the issues that people face every day, whether it's a flood that rolls in every year, or it's non-stop hurricanes, there are ways to solve these things and I'm inspired to find them and help people out.

How do you see your team’s work fitting into social change?

The forest welcomes everyone, you just come as you are. My team is very accepting, so that’s really nice. Even if we’re having a bad day, we feel comfortable enough to talk about our struggles. And my hope though is that as we're transforming socially and becoming a more accepting professional field, that we can expand our science research to be more in the 21st century too. My hope is that we can start having social media accounts, or someone can make a TikTok.