The End

     During my time at the Houston Museum of Natural Science (HMNS) I interned in Paleontology and gained many new skills. My work there involved collecting and search for fossils in the field, preparing them back at the lab, studying their imperfections like bite marks and fracture, and making a cast of one giant fossilized Diplodocus hip. 

     Through this experience I hoped to gain a better understanding of both paleontology and geology, and discover if this was something I wanted to do with my life. I have decided that geology is a path I want to pursue further, but I am not yet sure if I want to take the paleontology route or one of many others that I could pursue.  

     During this experience I worked with David Temple; associate curator of paleontology at the HMNS, Dr. Bob Bakker; curator of paleontology at the HMNS and a world renowned paleontologist in his own right, and also the volunteer of the HMNS. The other volunteers of the museum were the ones I was not thinking so much about when I started this experience, but, being that most of them are retired, they always had a lot of interesting carrier fields to talk about that come from all over the spectrum.

     I thoroughly enjoyed starting a hopefully long-lasting program between our school and the HMNS, and teaching others from the museum, visiting the museum, and from my school about what I learned. During this time I did not just get to present about my fieldwork to the community, but also to plan and teach a trip for other students in my high school to attend. There were lots of meeting times between David Temple, Dr. Ott; my science teacher, and I to plan the trips, and also many kinks to work out. I learned more than I could have ever expected to from this experience, and with these trips and my lab work I was able to achieve six of the learning outcomes of CAS for the IB program.