The battle of the marine labs for undergrad minds (and hearts)

I have TAed (translation: been a teaching assistant; please note that I will use TA as both a noun and verb throughout this blog) at both the Shoals Marine Lab and the Bodega Marine Lab and the experiences could not have been more different for me. But the real question is: how was it for the undergraduate science students that were there to learn?

Meet the contenders.
Shoals Marine Lab is a facility shared by Cornell and the University of New Hampshire with the primary mission of undrgraduate education. It is a summer-only lab mostly because it is on a very small island that is six miles off the coast of Maine and almost inaccessible and fairly inhospitable in the other three seasons. The students come from all levels of undergraduate studies and from campuses all over the country (as do the faculty). Courses that I have TAed there include Field Marine Science and Marine Invertebrate Zoology.

Bodega Marine Lab is a research unit of the University of California at Davis whose missions include research, graduate training, and undergraduate and public education. We are all out here year-round, but the resident undergrad classes are offered in the spring and summer. At times BML may seem very isolated from campus, but we are connected to the mainland and students can come and go at will. The students in the classes are mostly upper level undergrads from UC Davis (and the faculty are all Davis as well). Courses that I have TAed include Physiological Adaptations of Marine Organisms and Environmental Stress and Development in Marine Organisms.

Though the two labs seem miles apart (and there are literally about 3000 miles between them), they are both striving to provide undergraduates with educational experiences that they would not get in their on campus science classes. Classes at both labs are intense. Summer students are regularly in class 8 to 12 hours a day and at Shoals classes run 7 days a week (of course, they are on an island with nothing else to do). But I think that the intensity is an important and necessary part of the experience. Students in these 4- to 6-week courses receive credit equivalent to a full semester or quarter class on campus. But the learning experience is so different that I think that they take away more than they ever could from a campus classroom. Traditional lectures and lab exercises are part of classes at both labs and students at both labs have unparalleled access to the field (aka the intertidal, the mud flats, the tide pools, etc.). They are living and breathing science all day, every day. In all these courses, student projects and reports give the undergrads a glimpse of life as a scientist.

There are differences. At Shoals, students and instructors learn and live together on a small patch of land on a rock in the middle of the ocean. Everything is amplified a bit. This can be good and bad, but I do not think learning at Shoals could ever be a neutral experience. I have found that the instructors take every advantage of the unique learning environment and the students all benefit from that approach in their own individual ways. At BML, the students can readily escape from Bodega Bay and head back to friends and family inland on weekends. They do have way more contact with the instructors and their fellow students than they would back on campus, but they do not spend every waking hour together and that approach to the off campus learning experience has its advantages.

In my experiences at both labs over the many years that I have been a TA there seem to be things that students take away from these courses, that they may never get a chance to on campus. The total immersion in science can be a life-shaping experience for these undergrads. Regardless of the course or teaching style, students at both labs experience something of what doing science is really like and this often influences career paths. I have run into former students as they start graduate programs in science and at national scientific conferences. On a more personal level, the intense level of contact between the students and between the student and their instructors can have lasting results. Some students form lifelong friendships with people that will become their scientific peers. Others make personal discoveries, like self-confidence or independence, that they might not otherwise have in their four (or five) years on campus.

I am sure that the intensity of learning science way off campus works better for some students than others. But from my own observations as a TA, there have been only a few cases over the years that I can think of that a student returned to the real world the same student that they came in. And I think that is a good thing. I consider learning science by immersion at field stations like these two marine labs an invaluable part of the undergraduate experience. So much so that if I do chose a teaching career, I will have teach a course like those that I have TAed. I only hope that I have learned enough from the excellent instructors of those courses to provide life-shaping experiences to my future students.