Internship at the Smithsonian: Blog 5

Blog 5: The Taxonomist’s Assistants So far in these posts I have practically maintained a fiction that the entirety of research is done by curators and students—however, this gives a great disservice to a class of scientist just as large, if not larger, than the curators and researchers themselves. At the Smithsonian they are called…

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Internship at the Smithsonian: Blog 4

Blog 4: The Taxonomist’s Psyche You might wonder, with fair justification, just what sort of madness drives someone into systematics, let alone molluscan systematics. After all, it is a field that offers no great financial rewards, nor any chance to enter the history books. Systematics as a field is far too unscientific to merit any…

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Internship at École Normale Supérieure: Blog 1

Blog 1: The Secret Lives of Diatoms This summer I’m lucky enough to be interning in a laboratory based at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. The group research diatoms, which are microscopic, single-celled phytoplankton. Despite being unfamiliar to most people, they are ubiquitous in the earth’s aquatic habitats, and in contrast to their humble…

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My Micro-Internship at the Curiosity Box: Bulk Buying Marshmallows and Inspiring Children

STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) is needed and, more importantly, STEM is wanted. The former is obvious, because many countries like the United Kingdom or the United States have been taking action in promoting these subjects and improving the teaching quality in need of more people studying STEM since 2015. The latter has been…

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Internship at the Smithsonian: Blog 2

Blog 2: The Taxonomist’s Work When people imagine science, they imagine how it is in the movies. Men in white lab coats, peering into the fabric of reality, one breakthrough coming after another as if they were results on election night. The truth of science is much more pedestrian—whether it is physicists who pore over…

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Internship at POST: Blog 2

Blog 2: Engaging with Parliament During my 3-month internship at the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST), I was responsible for researching and producing a Parliamentary briefing document, called a “POSTnote” about a Biology and Health topic (see Blog Post 1). POST select science topics to research that currently are, or soon will be,…

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Internship at POST: Blog 1

Blog 1: Science and Parliament As scientists, many of us aim to make significant changes, both nationally and globally, through our research and discoveries. But many young scientists, like myself, may not have spent much time thinking about how scientific discoveries are actually implemented in society. I recently spent 3 months working as an intern…

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