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Intern

Addy Ngo

Wow! The Stanford Earth Young Investigators program was a great experience.

August 10, 2020

Wow! The Stanford Earth Young Investigators program was a great experience.

My last blog was written about 3 weeks into the program. This one was written a few days after the program. The project itself was an interesting and fun experience. My teammates, Adarsh and Ilinca were amazing teammates. Their coding experience was a major factor into our group getting the work done so fast. They also did wonderfully for the presentation. I am very grateful I had them as my teammates and I’m very honored to be next to their names in our abstract.

As for the program, I’m still shocked I got in! Originally because of COVID-19, I didn’t think the program would even happen. Now that it’s all said and done, I’m glad I was able to be a part of it. It was informative and exciting!

The final day was exciting but also made me nervous. Presenting in Zoom was definitely a new experience for me but it was cool. I practiced speaking my slides beforehand to prepare myself and I think it helped. Unfortunately, I messed up a little with introducing our names but overall I think I did well. The other groups did amazing too!

Pedro and Michael were great instructors throughout the program. Pedro on a komodo dragon was a cool image born from the final days.

Hopefully we’ll all be able to meet up in person on Stanford Campus or during the AGU meeting! That’ll all depend on when the pandemic is over though. In the meantime, wear a mask and stay safe!

Cheers,
Addy

I was intimidated at first as this is my first internship experience, but I quickly warmed up to it as everyone was very welcoming.

July 10, 2020

When I first saw the acceptance email from Dr. Saltzman I was very surprised. I applied for the program with little expectation of being accepted, but I am very grateful past Addy decided to apply. I also thank my AP Chemistry teacher, Ms. Sia, for writing my recommendation letter! The Stanford Earth Young Investigators program started on June 22. I was intimidated at first as this is my first internship experience, but I quickly warmed up to it as everyone was very welcoming.

Going into the program I felt very unknowledgeable as I have only done a high school level biology class and AP Chemistry. Mr. Monarrez is a great teacher and his lectures taught me a lot. For his first official teaching experience he was very patient and accepting of questions.

Body size is one of the ideas the program focuses a lot on and I would like to think I know a lot more about it than when I started. It’s very interesting the two major increases in oxygen correlates with eukaryotes and multicellular organisms coming to be and body size becoming bigger in general. I used to think the largest animal to have ever existed was during the Jurassic Period because as kids we’re taught that dinosaurs were gigantic beings and many other organisms were large during that time. Now I know the Blue Whale, which is in very recent time, is the largest known animal to have ever existed and they are still alive today. It seems silly not to know that looking back, but I have never thought about looking it up.

In the second week of the program we were introduced to R, a programming language. I’ve never heard of R and it was interesting to try to learn. Mr. Monarrez and Michael have been good teachers of R and answer any questions we have. Although after all that, I’m still pretty bad at using R and get many many errors but at least I know more than I started!

This week we finally got into our groups to start working on our project. My teammates Ilinca and Adarsh are extremely smart and helpful. They’re really good at using R and know a lot about biology. I feel very lucky to be in their group! As for the project, my group decided to work on molluscs with me working on gastropods specifically. Finding articles and researching has been a slow process for me but Mr. Monarrez, Ilinca, and Adarsh have been very helpful. I hope I can perform to their expectation!

That’s all for my blog! Thanks for reading!

Cheers,

Addy