Hello Citizen Scholars students and community!
Me at the KBS Undergraduate Research and Internship Symposium, which took place at the end of the summer. I created a poster to portray what I did and learned over the summer, and I gave a 60-second elevator speech about my experience.
My name is Grace Beltowski and I want to share with you the awesome experience I had as an intern with the W.K. Kellogg Biological Station (KBS) this summer. I’m a senior majoring in Professional Writing student, which probably does not seem at all related to the scientific research being done at a field station, yet I had the opportunity to make a very unique contribution to the KBS mission of expanding our ecological knowledge through my role as External Communications Intern.
For my main intern project, I was tasked with communicating the KBS “Summer 2019 Experience” to the general public. To do this, I focused on telling the stories of the people behind the research, specifically the undergraduates who were living and working alongside me this summer. I highlighted the experiences of these students through various platforms such as social media, blog posts, and student profiles, and I also helped produce a journal compiled of poems and sketches by KBS students and faculty so both they and the greater community could have a memento from the summer.
The Kellogg Bird Sanctuary is one of the oldest sites at the bio station and was a key player in reintroducing the Trumpeter swan population back to Michigan. I lived only five minutes away and got the chance to visit often throughout the summer.
What was most significant to me was that I got to see how my skills as a writer and communicator can be applied in a real-world setting. There’s a very important need for accurate and effective communication within the scientific community not only because we have the responsibility of sharing our findings with the public, but because we need to keep people engaged and educated so we can continue to receive support for our work. With the writing and storytelling skills I’ve developed over the past three years at MSU, I was able to help work toward this goal by crafting compelling, people-focused content, which I hope showed our audience how the science conducted at KBS is about more than just facts; it’s about benefitting lives.
“There’s a very important need for accurate and effective communication within the scientific community not only because we have the responsibility of sharing our findings with the public, but because we need to keep people engaged and educated so we can continue to receive support for our work.”
As part of my internship, I got to take an ecology class where we went outside every day to observe and collect data. On this particular day, we visited Bishops Bog in Portage and trekked through the muddy (and water spider-infested) trail.
I think being a Citizen Scholar was one of the best preparations I had for this experience. Since my freshman year, Citizen Scholars has helped cultivate the mindset that writing and storytelling have a place in any and every work environment I find myself in, which allowed me to have the confidence I needed to take an internship position in such an unconventional setting for my major. Citizen Scholars has also shown me the value in immersing myself in environments with people who are different from me, which made me continually excited to get up each day and not only learn from the ecology students I was working with, but share my own knowledge so they could learn something new as well.
Spending a summer at KBS—whether for an internship or classes or just walking around and learning more about the station’s research—is something I’d recommend to all Citizen Scholars, and it’s certainly an experience that’s expanded upon my own growth in the program.
The W.K. Kellogg Biological Station is a sub-campus of MSU located in Hickory Corners, MI, dedicated specifically to conducting research in the natural sciences. To learn more about the internship program, click here.