Hi friends! I’m Akhila Bandlora, and I’m an octopus lover, No Stupid Questions & Ologies enthusiast, and aspiring map maker. I’m a rising sophomore at Forbes (4th floor annex folks where are y’all at?!). I’m planning to concentrate in Psychology or Ecology and Evolutionary Biology with Certificates in creative writing, urban studies, and environmental studies. On campus, I’m a member of Songline Slam, an EcoRep, and a research assistant for Professor Desmond! In my free time, I enjoy exploring water bodies, hiking, and gardening!
I wanted to take y’all through a day of my life as an intern at Native Seeds Search, which is in Tucson, Arizona.
June 13th, 2021
6:30 AM: I start bright and early most days for my internship! We’re going through a heat wave this week with temperatures ranging from 105 to 115, but starting early helps cut the heat! Today, I sprayed the corn down with a mix of bat guano and algae! I forgot to take pictures, but I basically wore a backpack filled with liquid and doused our corn.
8:00 AM: I finished dousing the corn, and headed into our very pink building for some water.
8:15 AM: Now, it’s time to put up fencing! We’ve recently been having more and more problems with ground squirrels. We’ve theorized that because of how hot it’s been recently that the ground squirrels are getting more and more desperate for food. We’re planning a big monsoon planting season, so to make sure we have crops go to seed, we put up fencing!
9:30 AM: It’s officially gotten too hot for me, so I’m headed to a tarped area outside the building where I’m transplanting tobacco into the ground.
10:30 AM: This is the official end of my morning shift! Yay!
11:00 AM: This summer I’m also working with Professor Desmond and a few other students on her work with seed saving and the commons. We had our regularly scheduled meeting today, where we debriefed the data and analyses we pulled!
12:00 PM: I’m off from work and officially making lunch 🙂
3 Comments
I like how you posted your reflection in the form of your schedule! It was really interesting to read about and sounds like a lot of cool hands on work outdoors. Really shows the diversity within all our projects. Hope the rest of your summer goes well!
Wow this sounds super awesome and like a really interesting experience–very different from the kinds of things one does during the academic year. Although it does sound hot and sweaty 😉 What have you learnt from this summer that you will take with you back to an academic setting?
I love reading your daily schedule! I also spent days spraying plants (mostly potatoes to protect from the colorado potato beetle). It is so cool that in some ways we are doing very similar things but in different areas of the country and because of that we have different schedules and different ways we are adapting to work. Excited to talk with you more about your work!!!