The Essay:
My practicum experience was as part of the Fagan Lab, located in the 3235 Biology-Psychology Building, at the University of Maryland - College Park (so right on campus, though the vast majority of the work I did was conducted virtually). I found the Fagan Lab by perusing through the Maryland Opportunities for Research Experience website, which hosts a database in which lab members can make posting about open positions at their lab. I found a post from the Fagan Lab from two semesters ago, and thought it was worthwhile to follow up. However, it was not the only post I was interested. In total, I made a list of fifteen different labs that seemed interesting to me. I narrowed this list of fifteen labs down to the six that I felt would be the most fun to be a part of, and sent emails out to all six. However, out of the six, most were either unresponsive or already full. Thankfully the Fagan Lab still had openings and was willing to take me along. Advice for future SGC scholars reading this would be to apply to many different labs, not just one or two. Many are filled or no longer running those former projects, so in a sense it is a numbers game to figure out which ones have a spot for you waiting.
The roles on site were quite freeform, and students were allowed to carve out their own niches. Dr. Fagan provided a quick overview of the project and what its goals were, and also some subjects that he thought were interesting and might be worth delving into deeper. These subjects were what most students focused on, and the one I looked into was figuring out how long it might take for a captive oryx to calm down (if it does at all) once released into the wild. While it may seem like an odd subject, it would be of use to biologists on the field who are monitoring for abnormal behavior, and also trying to track the rates at which oryx settle into natural patterns. I was never on the field, but data which was gathered from the oryx (each of which is equipped with a collar) was provided, and it was this that I had to analyze. The data was a gargantuan collection of Collar IDs, location, and time information. By analyzing this, it would be possible to figure out the rates of movement for each individual oryx. However, that’s easier said than done, especially for someone with little experience in wildlife biology and little experience with using the main programming language (R) for the project.
In trying to gain familiarity with the project, I had to scour through Google Scholar to see how biologists track the movement of organisms and plot it. I was unable to find any papers that were particularly relevant to the subject at hand, but by piecing together various bits from them all, I was able to gain a fuller understanding of how the data is collected and organized. I gained a greater appreciation for the work that wildlife biologists do, and understood that wildlife biology wasn’t just some simple science where people write entries in a journal about what they saw in a forest, but a science that uses some of the most cutting-edge technology and theories in order to gain a greater understanding of the natural world. And being a computer science major, I was able to see how wildlife biologists make great use of computing in order to better parse through massive amounts of data that they collect. I found this project to be a greatly enriching personal experience, and also one in which I might be able to help an important project out in the real-world. I greatly enjoyed applying computer science to analyze the lives of animals, and I believe that I’ll likely continue to do so in some form. While I don’t think it’s too likely that I’ll pursue a career in wildlife biology, I will almost certainly volunteer in the future to help out with other projects which focus on saving species and restoring ecosystems.
SGC Gallery and On-Line Projects: