As a first semester freshman, I thought little of applying for internships due to my lack of experience.  When I received an e-mail from my Botany TA looking for research help, I responded that I would be up to the challenge.  I was shocked to find out that she picked me out of the pool of applicants for my enthusiasm in learning versus my lack of experience as a researcher.  As the semester wore on, I found a scholarship offered by the Garden Club of America for summer internships in field research.  With the help of my TA, I wrote an essay to the club about my inexperience and how much this opportunity would help me to learn more than I could inside a classroom.  I was the first CANR student to receive a scholarship from the Garden Club of America!

At the beginning of my internship, I had a general idea of what a field researcher did, but it's a different story when you are doing all the work.   My TA instructed me in the basics of field research for plants such as identification, plant pressing and mounting, and more advanced techniques of DNA and nitrogen sampling.  We studied the declining population of the plant known as Desmodium cuspidatum, a legume with its last documented sightings from the 80's in Connecticut.  Throughout our studies, we constantly tried to locate new populations of this scarce plant.  We would spend a few hours driving to the sites of known populations of plants which ranged from western Massachusetts all the way up to Vermont, usually forging into very rugged terrain.  Everyday we would hike up into mountainous territory, searching for new populations of plants.  We had to wear pants constantly because of the large amount of thorny bushes as well as poison ivy that grew along with the elusive Desmodium cuspidatum.  It was hot, sweaty work, and the mosquitoes loved me.  I was required to put on heavy strength deet, fortified insect repellent, to deter the enemy pests.  I never came home without some sort of battle wound either from the insects or the plants, but I loved every second of it.  I would come home with a new story every night about my misadventures in the wilderness.  By the end of my research, I found one of the two known populations in the state of Connecticut. I learned a lot about what I would like to do with my life because of the opportunity to have real life experience at an early part in my undergraduate career; this is something incredibly valuable that was made possible here in the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources.