Sea Grant Students: Helping Them Make a Difference

Part I

Audio: Music

Video: Aerial photo of Oregon State University campus, zooming in to students walking among the campus buildings.

Audio - Narrator: A university may be proud of its beautiful setting and its fine facilities for learning, but finally its reason for being is its students; and the quality of education they receive at the university are the best testament to its success.

Video: OSU graduation. Students on campus and in labs

Audio - Narrator: Today’s graduate students are tomorrow’s professionals. Along the way to their futures, these young people need both enriching experiences and financial support. The Oregon Sea Grant College Program at Oregon State University is happy to be able to help.

Video: Sea grant students in the field.

Audio - Narrator: Over the last decade Sea Grant has provided a total 2.5 million dollars to dozens of students. Each one of these students has a unique story -- about intellectual interest, commitment, and achievement. We’ll hear from several of them. But first, some background and context.

Video- Title: Bob Malouf Oregon Sea Grant Director

Video: Malouf on camera being interviewed

Audio - Bob Malouf: Students go all sorts of directions and it’s not always easy to follow them. Sea Grant’s been around now for thirty-five years and some of the students that we supported in the past, believe it or not, are reaching retirement age. And they’re in all kinds of fields.

Video: Former students who are now research and teaching professionals.

Audio - Bob Malouf: The majority have stayed at least in natural resources or having something to do with science, but not all of them in ocean science. They’re teachers, they’re managers; some of them worked with industry throughout the world.

Video: Footage of a science symposium

Audio - Bob Malouf: Sea Grant has a philosophy that’s, I think, reflected in the kind of students we support and in what they become. Our philosophy is that the science is not enough. If it’s not good science, it’s not going to help anyone, and that has to come first. But we’re interested in supporting work that makes a difference and that answers questions that need to be answered, so that we can manage resources wisely.

Audio - Bob Malouf: And the students tend to think that way too. Their individual research projects show that and what they become afterwards shows that, that they’re out there and involved. That’s very gratifying and I think it’s unique to Sea Grant.

Video: Photos from 1968 Oregon State University yearbook

Audio - Bob Malouf: In 1968, Sea Grant was just beginning here at Oregon State University. I came here with a Bachelors Degree in zoology and was one of the first crop of Sea Grant supported students at Oregon State University, working on a Master’s Degree in Fisheries.

Video: 1968 photo of Malouf as a graduate student

Audio - Bob Malouf: It changed my life.

Video: Malouf today meeting with a researcher

Audio - Bob Malouf: First of all, it introduced me to a new entity called Sea Grant, which I’ve stuck with for the last thirty-five years, in various ways. And I think that the concept of focusing on students, and the fact that I’ve benefited from that and that it did make a difference in my life has stuck with me. I’ve tried to think about students in the same way that I thought about myself when I first started.

Video - Title: Maggie Sommer 2002 Natural resource fellow

Video: Sommer walking down the Yaquina Bay Estuary trail in Newport, Oregon.

Video: Sommer being interviewed on camera

Audio - Maggie Sommer: I was the 2002 Oregon Sea Grant Natural Resource Fellow and I worked with a group of state resource agencies here. The Oregon State Parks Department, Department of Land Conservation & Development, DOGAMI, which is the Department of Oregon Geology and Mineral Industries, OSU and Sea Grant all combined to do a project to inventory and map all of the manmade erosion control structures on the Oregon Coast. That included some field work.

Audio - Maggie Sommer: I actually went out with a GPS, a digital camera, a laser rangefinder to measure the lengths of these structures which were rock revetments, also called riprap. Some were concrete or wood seawalls, et cetera.

Video: Footage of coastal revetments and seawalls.

Audio - Maggie Sommer: We went up and down the Oregon coast, mapped and documented them all and put it all together in a great big spatial database so it now can be accessed by folks continuing to work in those agencies who are responsible for issuing permits for these structures, evaluating their effects on the environment, et cetera.

Video: Photos of houses on a coastal bluff

Audio - Maggie Sommer: And personally, I learned an awful lot about database and GIS development, and that has been very useful to my further work in marine resources and fisheries.

Video: Sommer speaking to interviewer

Audio - Maggie Sommer: It was new for me to work with such a big group of agencies and people and coordinate all their interest in this project and the individual outcomes they all were hoping for from it. And it was a good experience for me. It was sometimes challenging trying to get everyone together in a room and to agree on specific steps in the project, but it turned out to be good overall. And it was helpful. There was a lot of useful input from each group that I think it really contributed to the utility of the overall final product. And they were all very helpful, in terms of understanding that it was also a learning process for me as a fellow, and they definitely went out of their way to make help available to me in any areas I needed it.

Audio - Maggie Sommer: I certainly learned a lot. And employers that I’ve worked for since then have been very impressed by that experience on my resume, both of the specific project and of working for Sea Grant.

Video - title: Dave Hering

Video: Dave Hering standing in a boat

Audio - Dave Hering: I’m a master’s student, right, at Oregon State, Fisheries & Wildlife. I worked for a few years before going back to graduate school at the Oregon Department of Fish & Wildlife in Corvallis there and got to know real well the people that work on this project.

Video: Closeup of Hering as he talks

Audio - Dave Hering: So when this opportunity from Sea Grant sponsoring a graduate student came up, it was a perfect fit. I knew Kim Jones, who’s one of the PIs, and Dan Bottom, the other one, and they hooked me up with this project.

Video: A small boat releasing a net into a river. Hering pulls the net into place to catch small salmon for testing..

Audio - Dave Hering: Well, I mean, I’m interested in the conservation of wild fish and their habitats and, you know, estuaries are a place that until recently were kind of ignored in that respect. We’re doing a lot of work restoring streams, putting large wood in streams and stuff like that. Meanwhile, all these estuarine habitats were still diked off and the fish couldn’t get into them.

Video: Hering and colleagues counting small fish and taking tissue samples

Audio - Dave Hering: So over the last few years it’s been a pretty popular thing to remove these dikes from estuarine marshes and it’s looking like they might be an important habitat for salmon as they go downstream. So, anything we can do, or I can do, to help understand how fish use these habitats and why they’re important to the fish’s life history, I think, will help conserve salmon for the future.

Video - title: Cidney Howard, 2003 John R. Knauss Fellow

Video: Howard on camera

Audio - Cidney Howard: The fellowship is all about helping you learn and helping you grow and figure out what you wanted to do. For me, it really opens my mind to really get to see people’s different perspectives when you see them internationally. And you deal with people from all economic classes and education, so that’s definitely a growing experience.

Video: Stock footage of the US capitol building

Audio - Cidney Howard: I think it’s great! It’s really a win-win situation because here they get recent graduates who know the latest research or who…

Video: Stock footage of the US State Department Building

Audio - Cidney Howard: In my case, the State Department doesn’t have a lot of scientists in their office and here they are making policy decisions based on science, but no one has a science background. So I think it’s really beneficial for them to have…Here’s this young person who is just out of school and has all these fresh ideas, and can really add a lot to the dialogue when it comes to policymaking decisions.

Video: Two people talking in front of the US Capitol building

Audio - Cidney Howard: Professionally, I think it just gave me a really unique perspective. I mean, how many people can say that they work at the State Department and get that international worldwide view of marine policy? I think that’s just really special and unique.

[end of part 1]