My REU Experience: Introduction

(This is going to be a multi-post story so stay tuned for more!)

In the summer of 2018 I completed an REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates) with the College of Charleston in South Carolina. I was in the middle of my sophomore year at the Ohio State University ready to spread my wings, move to a foreign place, and try something new. Well… study abroad trips are expensive so I went with the next best option—South Carolina. I had already had a tiny bit of research experience, but wanted more, so I went online and found the NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates website. There they have a huge overwhelming list of summer research programs in all STEM fields all across the country. I had no idea what I wanted to study, but marine biology was always something I was interested in when I was younger. I thought now would be a good time to satisfy that childhood curiosity so I selected a few marine science focused REU’s on the east coast. I submitted my applications that winter and totally forgot about them until months later when I received my acceptance letters from Charleston and another program in Massachusetts. (I chose Charleston because it would be warmer!)

My family was nervous sending me off on my own to a different state and I was nervous myself because I felt so unprepared. The next couple of months were a blur; I packed and repacked and read papers written by the advisor I had been assigned to based off of my interests in ecology, because it felt like the only thing I could control until I began the program. I did not know what to expect because I did not receive any information prior to starting the program except for an address to the dormitory building and a date to arrive by. When the day came to drive the ten hours to Charleston, I was not nervous anymore, but excited to be on my own in one of my favorite cities.

Within the first two days I met my supervisor at the Department of Natural Resources, and we spent a lot of time in his office talking about possible research projects. He worked on crustaceans so I got to choose between studying shrimp and crab. I personally think shrimp are kind of creepy looking, so I chose crab. And who doesn’t love crabcakes?? I was quickly overwhelmed by the idea of having to come up with my own independent research project. Many of the other students’ supervisors already had projects planned upon arrival, so it was very frustrating at first and I was not confident in my ability to come up with a novel research idea. On top of this I was trying to get to know my housemates and learn how to live independently in a new city. Looking back I really appreciate the freedom my supervisor gave me because it forced me out of my comfort zone; I had to be independent, learn how to design my own experiment, and learn how to ask good questions that would move my project in the right direction.

How I came up with a research idea

On the first day of my internship, my supervisor gave me a stack of papers on blue crab and told me to go to the library and not come back until I had a couple of ideas to work with, so I did just that. I spent all day reading paper after paper, taking notes and writing down questions that came to mind. The note-taking method that works for me when reading papers is to write down any important new information from the intro, significant results, and the author’s explanation of the results. I always recommend taking handwritten notes or typing them to make an annotated bibliography because then you can make sense of what you read and how everything ties together. It is also nice to have clear, organized notes on every paper you read because then you can remember where information came from when you need to go back to it. It is so much easier to look at an annotated bibliography than dig through a stack of papers or files on your computer looking for that one sentence you need to cite. I learned that trick from a Greek mythology class so never believe what people say about GE humanities courses being irrelevant!

One study that was done in the 1970’s caught my eye; the researchers did a field experiment where they measured blue crab growth rate over time and they noted a significant difference between male and female blue crab. Why would that be? I followed that lead and found more recent papers that made similar observations and talked about the differences between male and female blue crab physiology and behavior. I found out that male and female blue crabs occupy different habitats as adults; females go to the open ocean to spawn while male crabs remained in tidal streams that were closer to freshwater. This sexually dimorphic migration pattern also matched the results of the previous studies showing females growing better in high salinity (salt concentration), and males in low salinity. Unfortunately and fortunately there was not much prior research done on this topic, especially in South Carolina. I say unfortunately because there was not a lot of existing information to work from, and fortunately because that meant I had a clean slate to work on my own project and whatever I did would end up being new.

The next morning I took my idea to my supervisor and he told me to go to the library again to work on an experiment design that could answer that question. I knew I had sixteen aquariums to work with in the wet lab so I designed an experiment to test how male and female blue crabs would respond to varying salinity levels. I ended up using methods similar to the 1970’s study, but instead of being in a natural setting it was in a laboratory. Half of the tanks would be high salinity conditions, half would be low salinity, and I would divide the male and female blue crabs evenly across all of the tanks. The next day I worked on cleaning the aquariums, filling them with water, and adjusting the salinity levels. By the end of week one of my internship I was ready to begin my experiment. All I needed now was some crabs!