Shawn Zhu

he/him
Undergraduate Fellow
Plant Disease Team

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

I first heard of Tyson in Intro to Environmental Biology. I think Professor Pardini dropped it at one point in class. Then I heard more about it from my other professors, and there were some Tyson alumni in the Empire and Environment course who were saying good things. I thought, this is something I could do, and if I don’t do research now, I probably never will. I really want to try as many career paths as possible before I graduate. Last summer, I worked at a startup, and this felt very different. So, you know, I was down to try.

What have you learned here that might inform your future career?

One of the goals I had coming into this was getting some applicable skills in data science and general statistics programming. I’ve seen that a lot here, and I’ve learned how applicable programming and data management skills are. That’s pretty cool. I hope to do more of that. Other than that, I’m not sure yet, but there’s plenty of applicable skills involved in fieldwork. The not-so-glorious parts of being outside and physical labor will probably do some good in the future.

What might other teams not realize about what your team is doing?

I feel like we have a very different experience than other teams because we are in the city so much. They’re out in the woods battling ticks, and we’re standing in a garden. Which is nice, I can’t lie. But data-collection wise, it’s pretty similar. We have sites across the urbanization gradient. We have two rural sites, one at Shaw Nature Reserve and one here at Tyson. The two suburban sites are at Brittany Woods Middle School and University City High School. Then we have two urban sites in North St. Louis, one at a nonprofit called Claver House and the other at Ujima. It’s cool that we get to see the community gardening work going on in the city.

What moments from the summer have made you feel most connected to the Tyson community?

I’ve really bonded with the Plant Disease Team. It’s a small team. This is gonna sound so cult-y, but we found a song called CRV and we drive a Honda CRV. (Laughs.) Every time we get into the car, the first song we play is CRV. And it is a really horrible song. (Laughs again.) It’s just something dumb that we do.