CPBS Wraps Up Final Summer Session

By: Johnica Morrow

The final week of fourth session came to a close here at CPBS as students finished their final projects and turned in the last of their papers. With the conclusion of Field Parasitology and Ecology and Evolution, the station begins preparations to shut down for the summer. This season has seen lots of changes, which have been met with the extremes of both open excitement and resentful resistance. The summer has seen many ups and downs with students' misbehavior as well as students' amazing achievements. In this respect, the summer has been no different than any other summer here at CPBS. However, along with change often comes growth. The station has seen both literal and metaphorical growth throughout the summer.

CPBS has witnessed the growth of a garden near a kitchen where students grew their knowledge and skills as part of our partnership with UNL's Hospitality, Restaurant, and Tourism Management program. Thanks to all of our hard-working interns for rocking the kitchen this summer despite the whining of students and visiting researchers who wanted nothing but boring burgers every day! Our students picked up a wide range of culinary skills...from pastry making, to dough baking, to fish flaking, and temperature taking. They also learned all about meal planning, ordering, inventory tracking, scheduling, and other aspects of kitchen management. We've had amazing food representing countries from all over the world. We've had entrees that were both nutritious and delicious as well as desserts that were mostly just the later. We've been fortunate to have a wonderful group of hard-working individuals to represent our first successful summer with student interns all but running the CPBS kitchen. We hope that the future will bring new interns who will have very big shoes to fill after the group that graced Goodall this summer. 

CPBS has also witnessed the growth of students, two-three weeks at a time. Students arrived with enthusiastic ignorance and left with minds full of new knowledge about biological systems. It has been amazing to watch the transformation as students' faces light up while explaining a concept that they picked up during a session here at CPBS. The courses have been similar to those of the past, but something was different this year with class dynamics. Some sessions brought students with levels of discipline all too often not seen in college classes today, while others brought the opposite side of the student spectrum. With an increase in student enrollment this summer, there were many new faces in addition to familiar ones in our courses.

Today will be a flurry of cleaning, taking inventory, and putting away for the staff as the last of the students head back to Lincoln. We will have to fight the urge to sleep in this dreary weather while we prepare the station for her next big event, the Rocky Mountain Conference of Parasitologists, which will be held from September 4th-6th. This regional conference will bring in many prominent parasitologists as well as many students with promise to become such in the future. The kitchen staff is already busy planning out a menu for the conference and RMCP t-shirts have already been ordered. An experimental deal trading a waiver of room and board fees during the conference for 5 hours of volunteer help in the kitchen worked out well last year, so this year, the deal has been made more formal. A student volunteer application has been sent out to the RMCP members in hopes of getting help from some of the students who would like to offset their conference costs. This rare opportunity is mutually beneficial for CPBS and for RMCP student members who are tight on cash. If you'd like more information, you can contact Jon Garbisch or Airicca Roddy. (See CPBS website for contact information.)