It’s going to sound ridiculously long.

I was a kids’ nature camp teacher at the Rocky Mountain Biological Lab, I was a volunteer research assistant with some bird researchers at the lab, I worked at a homemade ice cream store and I volunteered at the Gunnison Valley Observatory.

I set out to be a kids nature camp teacher, and then I just stumbled across all these other opportunities that wound up being really fun.

It was a really awesome program. Four to eight was the most common age range. The camp was five days a week, and we went up to the Rocky Mountain Biological Lab  in Gothic, Colorado– it’s a field research site in this abandoned mining town, and it’s really cool. There are all these old cabins, and there were just a lot of really good hands-on activities for the kids. We had lesson plans based on either animals (or birds, specifically), insects, plants, water and geology, and we did all sorts of games to get kids excited about science.

Last summer, we went up to Colorado for a couple of weeks, and they had adult science tours of the biological lab, so my mom and I went on one of the tours. While we were on it, the guy who led the tour — actually, also the guy I wound up volunteering with this summer–anyway, he caught a snake, and I have a pet snake, so I was like, “oh my gosh, can I please hold the snake?” And the nature camp director was there, and she was like, “do you want to come take the snake over to the kids and talk about it?” So I followed her over to the kids’ camp, and, I mean–I just know things about snakes, because I’m that kind of person, and so I just gave them this little spiel. And she said, “you know, I think you might be a really good fit here!” So we coordinated over e-mail, and I sent in a resumé, and that’s how I got the job!

I worked with one of the resident professors and his two students. We were studying the mountain white-crowned sparrow, so we’d have to get up at 5:00 a.m. and go out into the middle of nowhere–like, you’d go five miles from the research station into a wilderness-type area. They had traps set up, so when a bird flew into a trap, it’d land on a pad and that would make a door shut. And then they’d go and take data on the birds: they’d weigh them and take physical measurements like wing size, beak size and leg size. They also banded the birds. One band had a serial number on it, and then they had three other colored bands in a unique color combination, so they could identify each bird.

Yes, the plan right now is to pursue a biological research job, potentially being a professor who researches during the summer.

Yes. I’m going to do some advertising here: this is the best ice cream store in the whole wide world, because they source all of their ingredients locally. Everything that they make is homemade. Usually, when ice cream stores say their ice cream is “homemade,” it means they buy a pre-made base, but the founders of this shop make everything from scratch. If they have a birthday cake flavor, they make the birthday cake and put it into the ice cream. They have some really weird flavors, like “Ants on a Log,” which is celery-flavored ice cream with peanut butter and raisins, and “Caprese,” which is goat cheese ice cream with strawberries and basil. It was really fun. I made waffle cones, served ice cream, ran the cash register and stuff like that.

The observatory was so cool, because you could see so many stars. I’ve never seen that many stars before, ever. It’s a completely non-profit organization, and it has the largest telescope in Colorado that’s available to the public. Almost everyone who works there is a volunteer — so aside from one physics professor from the local university, everyone else just really likes astronomy as a side hobby. I worked outside with smaller telescopes and just showed the visitors “oh, these are these constellations!” or I pulled up planets and stars and globular cluster — that sort of thing. It was really just teaching the public to be aware of their surroundings in the Solar System.

I really liked it when there weren’t as many visitors, because then the older volunteers who knew more about astronomy would show me how to find the galaxy Andromeda and all sorts of different landmarks in the sky that I didn’t know about before that. I really learned a lot from that.

Well, I was working the majority of the time. So I just kind of…deflated. It turned out that, on weekdays, there was a five-hour “Castle” marathon that started right when I got home from work, so I would just watch that.