Anna Wassel

she/they
Graduate Student
Pawpaw Patrol

How's your morning been?

Today's been very good. We actually had a little celebratory tea party this morning because we just finished putting all of our transplants in the ground in my experimental plots. So to celebrate that and the halfway point of the summer, we went up to the overlook and had a little iced tea and just watched the birds there. It was great.

Anna describes her path to Tyson as “serendipitous”. She completed her undergraduate degree in Atlanta and found herself in St. Louis one summer, working at the Missouri Botanical Garden. She had not intended to be in St. Louis – she only came after study abroad plans fell through – but after visiting Tyson for a community-wide event, she realized that she could see herself living and working in St. Louis for a while longer.

Anna secured a position as a technician with Jonathan Myers. She loved the research and loved St. Louis, so when she heard Jonathan was looking for grad students to join his lab, she applied to start a PhD. While she hadn’t been intending to start grad school right away, the opportunity was too perfect to pass up.

Prior to settling at Tyson, Anna has lived and worked in a handful of other places, including doing field work in Wichita and Costa Rica.

Does your Tyson experience feel representative of your time at other field stations?

No, it's way cooler. [laughs] It is interesting that it's not residential, because we lived at field stations when I was doing my study abroad program. We were mostly at field stations, but none of those had any sort of larger, permanent undergrad program like this one. I can think of maybe one other field station that I have heard of that has a similarly tight-knit community, but it's kind of hard to imagine that it's as good as this one. At the field station I worked at in Wichita, we were the only people working out there. It was just technicians and the station manager, and occasionally a grad student or two would come out, but it was very small. There was one building… The facilities here are really nice. The commute is really nice. It's a good place to be.

How does this summer specifically feel to you?

It's so nice to have everything really up and running. I really like having it very full, we're a little bit bursting at the seams. But for me, I just get to enjoy the hustle and bustle, I don't have to deal with any of the logistics. It makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside. I'm very grateful to work in a space where people really feel like they can be themselves and be curious. It's just the best place to be. Best place I've ever worked. This is my happy place. Working here is a large reason why I wanted to do grad school in the first place.

I do think my team is a little prone to getting slap happy this year, myself included. So there have been some just funny gibberish conversations that have happened. One time someone accidentally squished a grub and it turned into goop and now everything is gub and goop–like ‘the gubs are gooping’. We're slowly but surely developing our own language.

I feel nice and comfortable this year. Which means that things are probably coming to an end soon. As soon as you get comfortable in a place, the universe is like, all right, onto the next thing…

I probably have one more field season here and then I'll hopefully probably be finishing my PhD after that. So the end is nigh. I would love to stay in St. Louis long term, but we'll see how that shakes out. I have some things pulling me in a couple different directions.