College and Major: Auburn University College of Agriculture, Fisheries, Aquaculture, and Aquatic Sciences

Hometown: Daleville, Alabama

Career Goals: I want to be an aquaculturist and maintain care of the fish and the plants in aquaculture systems.

Hobby or Fun Fact: I love to crochet, and I can play the saxophone.

Thoughts from Leah

Preinternship

Two goals I hope to achieve during this internship is one, to improve personal skills like adaptability, interpersonal communication, and creativity, and two, to learn and experience as much as I can about the fisheries and aquaculture industry through Extension and see where I would like to go career wise in the industry. Education and outreach are the two main things that immediately grabbed my attention when I learned about working for Alabama Extension. Getting information out to the public and letting people know there are free resources available to them is really important to me. People can do many things if they have the resources made available, and that’s one thing Extension does well.

Postinternship

This internship helped me improve my Microsoft Excel skills, specifically with data entry and being able to take information and present it in a way others will be able to clearly read it. My creativity has increased and I am better at adapting to situations and trying to come up with multiple solutions to problems that may occur. My favorite memory of this internship is spending the week down at the coast, Dauphin Island, for the coastal summer camp and seeing how many younger students are looking at a career in aquaculture and learning more about marine life.

My biggest takeaway from this internship is that every situation is an opportunity to learn. Sometimes I would be inside all day working on surveys and reading articles about the industry while other days I would be outside applying knowledge I learned in the classroom and seeing how similar or different it is from the textbook example I was shown. One advice I would give to future interns would be to have an open mind. I was learning something different everyday and sometimes I would walk in and be given an opportunity to ride along with a delivery or jump into a pond to learn how to seine. Every day was different and it caused me to learn so much and having an open mind on what I would do definitely helped me appreciate the experiences more.