Graduate Student Cruise Opportunities

Opportunities abound for graduate students to have hands-on experience aboard the OOI deployment expeditions in 2020. The first opportunity is during the spring Endurance Array deployment aboard the R/V Sikuliaq. as part of the UNOLS Cruise Opportunity Program. The Endurance cruise will run from 31 March-15 April 2020, departing from and returning to Newport, Oregon. Applications to UNOLS are due by 28 February 2020.

Students currently completing (or who have recently completed) a degree in a field of oceanographic research are eligible to apply. Those selected will learn about the functional aspects of seagoing work, while helping to deploy and recover oceanographic moorings, profilers, and gliders off the Washington and Oregon coast. Students also will assist in CTD (conductivity, temperature, depth) casts and acquisition of data while underway. Other specific assignments can be developed based on students’ expertise and interests.

To learn more and to apply for the Spring 2020 Endurance Array cruise, visit UNOL’s Cruise Opportunity Program. Other OOI array deployment cruises are being planned for the fall, so stayed tuned for more exciting opportunities later this year.

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Early Career Highlight – Haley Cabaniss – Studying Oceans and Volcanos in America’s Breadbasket

“The thing that makes oceanography accessible in Illinois and any place inland,” says Cabaniss, “is that we have these awesome datasets like the OOI. Anyone anywhere in the world can go online, grab these datasets and start playing with them.”

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Early Career Highlight – Dax Soule – Using the OOI to Build Paths for Success in His Students and His Research

The OOI is like a fire hose with data pouring out,” says Soule. “It’s just there, regardless of whether anyone is using it. If you are brave enough to lean in and just take a sip, just grab a tiny fraction of that data, well that’s enough for a research project right there.”

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Early Career Highlight – Veronica Tamsitt – Taking hold of opportunities in the Southern Ocean

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Early Career Highlight – Wu-Jung Lee’s journey into ocean sound from dolphins to bats and back to the sea

“One of the reasons I first got interested in the OOI data was because it is free and available to the public,” says Lee. “Once I started working with the data, I realized just how special it was. I spent all of my time for several months on the OOI echosounder data.”

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Early Career Highlight – Cassandra Alexander – Oceanographic research experiences at a landlocked undergraduate teaching university

“The Ocean Observatories Initiative really opens it up for students to be able to do a lot of different things with the ocean data,” says Alexander. “As long as you can think of it, you can explore it.”

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Early Career Highlight – Kanieka Neal – From Maryland to Massachusetts, pushing her chemistry comfort zone

“The OOI is a great resource for students,” says Neal. “It’s not too time consuming, comes right to your inbox, and is very organized so I could pick it up really quickly. It’s amazing that the data are right at your fingertips; you can just go in and get it.”

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Early Career Highlight – Brendan Philip – From a life on the sea surface to exploration of the seafloor

“It’s a 25-year program and you have committed to sailing every year to service your arrays,” says Philip, “that is a tremendous opportunity for students and researchers on board to do research that leverages the OOI instrumentation. The OOI is more than just data streaming to shore, it is also about the additional science you can do while you are out there.”

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