Recently, I was going through old photos of my family to put together a slide show for my mom and dad's 50th wedding anniversary. I found this picture of me when I was at UC Santa Cruz working on my senior thesis at their marine lab. Two things occurred to me: 1. How great a school UCSC was to give an undergraduate space and equipment at their main reasearch lab to do the project, 2. This was where I really fell in love with how science works and the scientific method.
In regards to the first point, I really don't know how things are done now at universities, but in the early eighties the kind of access I had to lab space, equipment and expertice was amazing. My lab had everything I needed to keep my critters alive and happy. Just outside my window, Rocky the sea lion was being taught all manner of new things (she was on the cover of Newsweek in May, 1988 though I can't find the link to that article, there was an obituary for her here in 2004). Dolphin, elephant seal, squid and whale research was going on right next to my humble little sea stars. I was able to talk with the graduate students and profs who came in to do their research at the lab. My research, thanks to my advisers, John Pierce and Jim McClintock even got published. No wonder then, that I fell in love with the whole process.
Up until that point, I had been a science major because I was good at memorising lots of information and I liked the outdoor part of field studies. The actual science aspect of hypothesis, data analysis, etc. just seemed like paperwork to me. But the actual research, involving talking to really smart people (not just reading other published work) and doing the testing, seeing new leads and retesting got me into science at a far deeper level. This is where I found how powerful the scientific method really is as a philosophy of problem solving. This is where I try to take my students now when I teach.
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