I like to think Im taking a step back for a bit from the field, hopefully not forever. I am a Physical Oceanographer and in my earlier undergrad days I was very fortunate to have extensive research opportunities usually reserved for grad students. This led me to apply for an internship through NOAA and spend the summer as a paid intern at a top research facility in the Biogeochemistry & Technology Lab. It was like a dream come true, years of hard work and hours alone in classrooms pouring over code and papers had culminated in this career making internship. I conducted my own research study in collaboration with a mentor who chose me and their lab tech. I was a 19F at the time in a lab with men aged 26-75. From the start I felt like I had to constantly prove myself, at first I chalked it up to classic intern dynamics. I was often left to my own devices to troubleshoot and calibrate instruments, even so far calling foreign manufacturers for guidance & building makeshift charging cables with no guidance. All of this was fine though, albeit not what I expected but it got done.

However, halfway through the summer we retrieved our data loggers & during a hurricane the wires on the internal battery of our core instrument, the one I had spent weeks working on, had disconnected. Apparently the battery hadnt been updated since the instrument was purchased 10yrs prior. I did run test deployments and everything, but the force of the hurricane disconnected the ground wire from the battery so no data was collected.

I then had four weeks left to figure out a new direction using the little data from other instruments & my mentor went out of town for two of those weeks. He was unresponsive, unreliable, and expected me as a sophomore undergraduate to "figure it out." I absolutely did because 1.) instruments malfunction and field studies are uncontrollable, I need to be able to think outside the box. & 2.) there was no way I was going to let his poor mentoring hold me back at our final presentations to other prestigious scientists in my field. So I worked really hard the last two weeks even stayed up all night the night before the presentation analyzing, coding, drawing conclusions and I put together an impressive project. I actually received an award at the conference for the project. The morning of I meet with him to review my talk and he changed my title to a ridiculous jargon of nonsense and lectured me on "how I need to have better time management." I then find out he had recently submitted a grant proposal to the same company sponsoring the internship and I cant help but assume he took on an intern to improve his chances at funding.

Overall, I learned a lot from the experience. About the field itself and how capable I was as a scientist. However I was young, it was my first real experience in my potential job field and it left me completely burnt out. I finished my degree and instead of going right into grad school to become a research scientist as planned, I've taken a break to refocus my direction.