Mesa Fitzgerald

she/her
Undergraduate Fellow
Forest Biodiversity Team

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

I recently made the switch from molecular to environmental biology and I wanted to get some hands-on experience to see if I actually liked it. I worked in an immunology lab on the medical campus at WashU and I wanted to do research full-time. But that was not the type of research that I could see myself doing forever. Here, working on the Forest Team is completely different, completely out of my comfort zone. Completely. Also, I love trees.

What has surprised you about field work?

I didn’t know what to expect, so I would say this isn’t necessarily good or bad, but right now since we’re doing a census, it’s pretty repetitive. The learning curve is fast, and you quickly get comfortable measuring trees. Yeah. So I feel like that surprised me — how quickly it became natural. And then watching the TERAs come in and do stuff, you’re like wow, I was just there literally a couple weeks ago.

How does your team stay motivated?

I feel like we joke a lot. We also have team leads — one of the technicians is always the lead. At lunch we’ll be like, okay, inspirational speech time, and they’ll say something super cringy. (Mesa laughs.) But I would say yeah, good team dynamics. People talk while we work. No one’s ever alone or being quiet or anything. I feel like it’s easy to stay motivated when you’re just doing one thing at a time. You’re in the forest, there’s a tree, there’s another tree right next to it, you kind of just keep going until it’s done. I like to break up my day in half. After lunch, the day is almost over. I don’t know, it just never feels like a challenge to be here. Because everyone’s nice. Maybe that’ll change when it gets really, really hot.