My Summer at NMLC by Lianna Montgomery

I spent my summer at the National Marine Life Center as an education intern and I had a lot of fun!

Last week ended my summer at NMLC and I was sad to go but I had such a great time. I learned a lot and met so many great people.  My duties as an education intern along with the 4 other interns were to help run education programs, create and run arts and crafts and storytime, run marine animal medical mystery, even work with the two turtles Patty and Catch 22 and various other jobs.

In June we released our 8 little Diamond-Backed Terrapins!

We also went to a number of festivals over the summer which were really cool. We taught the public about who we are and what we do at NMLC and we also had crafts for the kids to do. One really cute craft were paper sea turtles, they’re super cute and the kids love to make them.

When we brought our Red-Bellied Cooters to the state turn-in in June we came back with one little turtle whom we name Catch 22. He got an exam and X-Rays when we got back to the center and we noticed on the X-rays that he had a staple inside of him! Luckily he passed it and is doing great!

Us Interns, with the help of Robert, were in charge of getting the critter tank in the Discovery Center set so we could add critters to it. We also helped out in the Hospital, painting and tidying it up a little. Once the education programs started in July we were in full swing getting crafts ready and hosting groups that came in. We made so many awesome and cute crafts this summer!

For the 4th of July we created a Finding Nemo float, we created the characters out of cardboard and painted them and they turned out amazing. We attached them to a Mass Maritime boat for the parade.

Over the course of the summer we all worked on projects about a topic of our choice, I chose seals and created some puzzles, posters and a game about seals. All the interns did a great job on their projects and after we presented them we got to go to the Woods Hole Aquarium and Buttonwood Zoo! It was awesome!

This summer I had a great time being an intern at NMLC, I made great friends, learned a lot and got to experience some new things.

I had such a great summer and thank everyone that was a part of it! I’ll miss everyone and can’t wait to go back to NMLC!

 

Posted by Lianna M.
Lianna is a Summer, 2010 Intern at the National Marine Life Center. She is a senior Aquaculture and Aquarium Science major at the University of New England.