Name: Isabelle Goodrich
Class Year: 2025
Major: Biology
Hometown: Boston
Internship Organization: Northeastern University Marine Science Center
Job Title: Intern
Location: Nahant, MA
At my internship, we have begun our coastal ecology experiment! I am working under a fourth year Ph.D. student in the Bowen Lab at Northeastern University. The central research question examines nitrogen production in the coastal ecosystem of marshes, and we are looking at the microbial communities to examine levels of nitrogen. To do this, we have gone out into the field and have taken 28 soil cores from a freshwater marsh in Hanover, Massachusetts. While some of the cores will be for control, we will be treating some of them with increased temperature, increased salinity, and sometimes both. The treatments will either be in a pulse or press format, meaning some will recover rapid exposure to the treatment, a “pulse,” while the others will receive long term exposure, a “press.” These treatments help us understand how climate change will affect the environment. To ensure that the marsh conditions are maintained, we have built tide simulating machines out of five-gallon buckets, aquarium heaters, and water pumps. These buckets hold the cores, which are submerged according to the “tides.” We collect water regularly from the same marsh to ensure we have enough to replace water lost to evaporation and sampling.
Recently, we went out into the field to collect the cores. Unfortunately, the path into the marsh was extremely overgrown, the earth was swampy, and the thorns were abundant. We squelched and clawed our way to where Brian, the Ph.D. student, had set up a boardwalk. We used PVC piping to hold the soil. We drove the piping into the ground with a sledgehammer, and wrenched the sample out of the ground with our hands and small shovels. This took several hours—by the end we were covered with mud. Though we were exhausted, this was one of the most fun days at the internship; this was the first time I’d been in the field as an actual research assistant, and I got a taste of what the scientific process is really like. We finally returned to the lab at around seven in the evening, and stayed for three more hours, making sure the cores were safely prepared. Being a part of the hands-on research, experimental design, and physical labor, made me feel extremely connected to the work we were doing, and fostered an increased sense of responsibility and attention to detail. This is exactly the kind of experience I had hoped to gain by working in a marine science lab this summer.
My favorite part of the internship has been getting to see what scientific research is like in the real world, and how actual working scientists conduct experiments and plan their academic years. I have also gained great insight on the career path of becoming a scientist and all the years to get there. A challenge from this internship has definitely been the experiment design: we built our own equipment with tools and devices from Home Depot — so of course there were many minor problems we had to engineer along the way, such as drilling holes in the buckets to promote water drainage, or double gluing the PVC when it began to allow in oxygen bubbles. The toughest thing about it was replicating a problem-solving technique over and over again for the number of buckets we had. This work became exhausting and repetitive, though extremely necessary.
Visit the Summer Internship Stories page to read more about student internship experiences.