Author: Brynnen Beck | Major: Environmental, Soil, & Water Science | Semester: Summer 2024
My name is Brynnen Beck and I’m a senior Environmental, Soil, & Water Science major with minors in Geology & Sustainability. I’m a student in Dr. Speir’s Stream Biogeochemistry & Ecosystem Ecology lab on campus. We focus on water quality research, and my undergraduate honors thesis investigates how road salts and their “eco-friendly” alternatives impact an important ecosystem process, denitrification.
My lab members and I traveled to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to attend the Society for Freshwater Science (SFS) Conference. Attending this conference exposed me to many different research areas and topics within freshwater science. I would say this helped me with my research because I was able to learn about other ways road salts impact our freshwater ecosystems. I would also say that it motivated me even more with my thesis work because of the feedback I received when I presented my poster on my research. The poster presentation gave me a lot of insight as to
Brynnen Beck with her poster at SFS.
how to better explain my project to people, as well as some improvements to implement for our second round of experiments. I received a lot of positive and encouraging feedback on my poster. People told me that I should be proud of such a cool project and all the hard work that I’ve put into it. It was very validating and gave me a good burst of motivation to keep pushing! I was really worried about presenting my data, because the results didn’t totally make sense to me and were not statistically significant. But everyone that I talked to assured me that sometimes that’s just how science turns out, and that the important thing is to keep going and not get discouraged. Many people then recommended, or we brainstormed together some ways to improve our second round of experiments for smoother, more significant results.
Presenting my thesis work at SFS was initially intimidating for me. I was really worried about presenting to a lot of people who know a lot more than me, but everyone was incredibly encouraging and only made comments that would further help my research. I had some great conversations about graduate school and other people’s research as well. It was a great opportunity to meet people and there were many mixers and opportunities available to network with other people in my field. Meeting other undergraduate students was awesome because we’re all in similar stages of trying to figure out what to do next. It was nice to recommend programs I know of and relate to other students about life after undergrad. Go to as many interesting presentations as you can but be sure to take some breaks. The conference days can be long with lots of opportunities to socialize, so you don’t want to burn yourself out and not be able to make it to all the fun stuff!
Next, I am going to conduct a second round of sample collection, experiment, and analysis. This will further round out my dataset so that I can get some results for my thesis. I’m set to defend in the Fall 2024 semester, so I am preparing for that.