Amani Griffin

Undergraduate Fellow
Team Vibes

How did you get here? What brought you to Tyson?

Towards the end of last semester, my calc three and differential equations professors sent me an email regarding the Tyson Fellowship. It was very brief, they were looking for people who were interested in doing research and they told me to send over my resume. And that’s kind of how I ended up here. I had an informal meeting with Kim, and ten days later I got an email saying I got in. And then that same day, Susan was like, by the way, we have orientation at 2:00 pm — can you make it? I said yeah, sure.

What has surprised you? What did you not expect?

I didn’t have any expectations coming in, nor did anything surprise me because I came in pretty quickly and last minute. So I didn’t have anything to really look forward to. That sounds terrible! [Amani laughs.] But more in terms of like, okay, cool, this is a new experience and I’ll just welcome whatever comes with it. I guess it is a surprise how welcoming the community is, how important it is for everyone at Tyson to feel welcome, informed, and included in discussions. That doesn’t happen a lot in workspaces or even in schools. So I feel like that is a pretty positive surprise. But that’s more of a life surprise thing, than it is a research surprise thing.

How has your past work prepared you for this experience?

My data science work was more on maize, doing image processing and statistical analysis, versus now I’m doing geospatial analysis, and they’re completely different. But what I learned from research the first time is that not everything is laid out or planned. There’s a lot of exploring and collaboration, and sometimes not having an answer is an answer, and that is equally okay. It’s going to be chaotic at times. So that helped me in this case, where there may be times where we really don’t know what’s going on, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing. It just means, hey, let’s go look at this tree for a second. And then it’s like, oh wait, I didn’t even think about this. This tree is yellow. I don’t know. Sometimes you just gotta be Dora [the Explorer] for a second and find something you hadn’t thought of.

What’s been an affirming moment in your work this summer?

During one of our lab meetings, Kasey [Fowler-Finn] mentioned how what we’re doing hasn’t really been done before. And how in a couple of years, she might publish, and we would all be a part of it. So this is new, and people could look at what we’re doing, and cite it and use it. Even if they’re like, we’re gonna prove them wrong, I’m like, you still gotta read it first! That was pretty reaffirming, because I would’ve never guessed that this would be my future five years ago. To be a part of something so new, and so scientific, is really, really cool.