Finzi Lab: Forest Biogeochemistry and the beginning stages of my science nerd transformation

I never knew that root picking would turn out to be one of the most useful science skills I've ever learned. It is exactly what it sounds like: you take a soil core sample (a.k.a. pile of dirt) and use tweezers to pick out root and rhizome biomass. It is pretty tedious, fairly boring, and is best done in the presence of a great lab team and loud music. Soil core analysis turned out to be a skill that served me well later in BUMP (more later) and I still owe this lab a huge thank you for letting me be a part of their summer 2008 field team.

Finzi lab is what first got me hooked on the life of a researcher (http://www.bu.edu/biology/people/faculty/finzi/). Sure, I had to do a lot of the 'grunt' work such as washing dishes and pipetting standards but I also got my hands on some pretty cool science that summer. We backpacked Mt. Eisenhower, NH collecting soil cores and treating in-ground cores with isotopic nitrogen, nitrite and nitrate. The combination of being in the field, physical labor, and science really worked for me. Even though I was a marine focus I realized I had stumbled upon the type of thing I wanted to be doing in the future.  I spent that summer in either the field or the lab in Boston where I got a bunch of lab techniques under my belt. This is one of the best work environments I've ever been in and I continued to volunteer throughout my entire sophomore year.