Isaiah Helmer - My Last Few Weeks with St. Lawrence County Public Health's Mosquito Research Team

 

    As I finished up my internship with the St. Lawrence County Public Health’s Mosquito Research Team, I took the time to look back on how much I’ve learned and how much more confident I became in my position since the beginning of the summer, and after doing such, I can definitely say that I feel this experience has given me a much better understanding of both field and laboratory work in regards to entomological studies.

    Throughout, my routine has stayed fairly consistent. Most mornings had been spent out in the field visiting our collection sites, checking and bringing in CDC, gravid, and DRB collections from our traps. In the afternoons, we brought our collections back to the lab and spent time identifying the mosquitoes under the microscopes down to their exact species. By the end of my time there, I had become much more comfortable with the whole mosquito identification process and rarely needed to rely on the dichotomous key for the species I had become quite familiar with. Honestly, one of the most rewarding parts of the internship had been seeing how much my identification skills had improved. Early on, I would often ask someone to double-check my progress before I felt confident in submitting my IDs. Now, I feel sure that I could work through a good amount of collections on my own with much more ease. It has been really satisfying to see how much I’ve learned simply through repetition and hands-on experience everyday, without any prior experience working closely with insects.

    Fieldwork had also become much more routine. We had established rotating routes and collection sites, so everyone knew where they needed to go and what needed to be done each day. Even though the routine had become familiar, every collection day was still a little different. Weather, trap catches, and the species we found all changed from one day to the next, which made it interesting to watch mosquito abundance and diversity change throughout the season.

    Another part of the experience I especially appreciated had been working alongside my teammates. Working with the group I was a part of together really had made the experience even more enjoyable and had further shown me how important teamwork and proper communication between folks is when conducting consistent research. I was the last intern standing at the end of my term, so the last couple weeks was just me, which was a bit lonely, but still just as interesting and busy.

    Overall, I’m incredibly grateful for everything this internship has taught me. I’ve gained very valuable experience with mosquito surveillance, field sampling, species identification, handling information regarding disease vectoring species and laboratory work, but I’ve also gained a lot more confidence in myself and my abilities. This experience has been a fun but equally an important step in my education and career, and I’m excited to take what I’ve learned here with me into future work with wildlife and herpetology.