update on my becoming a world famous marine biologist...
So it turns out I, by the grace of God, will be presenting my research at a fisheries conference in Las Vegas this February. Because I am a nerd I suppose I could have started this like "Yo, it turns out I am going to Vegas for my 21st birthday, dude that rocks" but y'all know me better than that. Anyway, I am pretty excited about that, my prof. and I met today to decide what to do with the remaining 4 weeks of my independent study. It just so happens that the paper abstract submission deadline has been extended to Dec. 5th, which gives me plenty of time to synthesize my research into something between a four slide power point and a twenty page term paper. Anyway again because I am a nerd I have began writing my paper presentation before um, my paper. As I was writing it I thought to myself, "Gee this is sounding an awful lot like a live journal entry" and "I bet those folks at live journal, really don't care, but I am going to post this anyway..." So here is my presentation up to the meat of my research which, unless you have a salt water aquarium would bore you to death anyway. I might even post about that later, we will see.
And remember we are fishery scientists, which means my audience will be mostly intoxicated and very unprofessional listeners
"So I am from Seattle, and you know Seattle, we love our locally grown organic produce, our “dolphin safe” tuna, our homemade bio diesel…so what is really frustrating to me as an undergraduate fisheries major studying the marine aquarium fish trade at the University of Washington, or for the purposes of this paper, a good intentioned aquarium hobbyist, is why
don’t consumers know about the issues surrounding where their fish come from? Or do they?
You all have heard of these issues, and probably care about them nearly as strongly as I do. That is probably why you are here, except for that wholesaler over there who never read the invitation and thought he was going to a trade show. He just turned in his name badge and snuck out the back door before anyone could notice he wasn’t MAC certified.
Anyway, how I as an undergraduate got caught up in this whole mess, began as a term paper for a guy who is crazy about community based resource management, in the Philippines as it were. At that point I was planning on becoming a run-of-the-mill coral reef ecologist, and he might not have yet convinced me otherwise. So he provided us with a list of paper topic suggestions, and I picked the Aquarium fish trade because it was one of two marine topics and it sounded sexier than tuna.
Now I am fairly well known in our fishery department for being far too ambitious as an undergrad. I am the one who they could not force to take any of the exceedingly broad, boring entry-level classes until it was too late (and I might have to pay for that by going an extra year). So I got a little caught up in this term paper, and had not finished it to my satisfaction for three quarters after it was due. I have been driving Patrick my Professor here crazy about it until he finally decided to get involved with a little research of his own.
So now I am going to present to you how I feel about the aquarium trade as an ambitious undergraduate or as I said before, from the perspective of a good intentioned consumer."
Sorry for the long post, I thought it was an amusing little biography of the past year or so...And what is live journal for if not to boast of your accomplishments
And remember we are fishery scientists, which means my audience will be mostly intoxicated and very unprofessional listeners
"So I am from Seattle, and you know Seattle, we love our locally grown organic produce, our “dolphin safe” tuna, our homemade bio diesel…so what is really frustrating to me as an undergraduate fisheries major studying the marine aquarium fish trade at the University of Washington, or for the purposes of this paper, a good intentioned aquarium hobbyist, is why
don’t consumers know about the issues surrounding where their fish come from? Or do they?
You all have heard of these issues, and probably care about them nearly as strongly as I do. That is probably why you are here, except for that wholesaler over there who never read the invitation and thought he was going to a trade show. He just turned in his name badge and snuck out the back door before anyone could notice he wasn’t MAC certified.
Anyway, how I as an undergraduate got caught up in this whole mess, began as a term paper for a guy who is crazy about community based resource management, in the Philippines as it were. At that point I was planning on becoming a run-of-the-mill coral reef ecologist, and he might not have yet convinced me otherwise. So he provided us with a list of paper topic suggestions, and I picked the Aquarium fish trade because it was one of two marine topics and it sounded sexier than tuna.
Now I am fairly well known in our fishery department for being far too ambitious as an undergrad. I am the one who they could not force to take any of the exceedingly broad, boring entry-level classes until it was too late (and I might have to pay for that by going an extra year). So I got a little caught up in this term paper, and had not finished it to my satisfaction for three quarters after it was due. I have been driving Patrick my Professor here crazy about it until he finally decided to get involved with a little research of his own.
So now I am going to present to you how I feel about the aquarium trade as an ambitious undergraduate or as I said before, from the perspective of a good intentioned consumer."
Sorry for the long post, I thought it was an amusing little biography of the past year or so...And what is live journal for if not to boast of your accomplishments