Education

This experience was so much more than I ever could have imagined. To build a little
background, I am someone who has always struggled with self doubt when it comes to my
place in the STEM career path. The persistent habit of constantly comparing myself to others is
something I was very acquainted with, and struggle with sometimes still, but this program flipped
some kind of switch within me. The first day of the program I was feeling intimidated like always,
but the level of comfort provided by Kelsey (on top of a REALLY cool introduction tour of the

At the start of this program there were a lot of things I didn’t know. I didn’t know that frogs don’t have diaphragms like humans, and therefore breathe through their skin and manually draw air into their mouths to push towards their lungs. I didn’t know that locusts don’t start out as locusts, but instead, certain species of grasshoppers become locusts when they are in dense contact with others of the same species, triggering chemical changes in the grasshoppers’ brains.

By Ava Claus

By Alexander Fenlon

During the first week of our program, we visited a lab associated with the Central Arizona–Phoenix Long-Term Ecological Research as part of our campus tour. Gawking at a worktable covered in dusty plant samples, taking puzzled glances at pouches filled with nothing but atmospheric gases, and snaking past each other as we crammed into a room-sized freezer, we were privy to myriad facets of our local ecosystem in perfect isolation: crystal-clear data.

This is a guest post by 2022 DEI Biocollections Summer Scholars Program alum, Jacob Kerwin.

Herping and Derping:

This is a guest post by 2022 DEI Biocollections Summer Scholars Program alum, Emi Sarmiento.

This is a guest post by 2022 DEI Biocollections Summer Scholars Program alum, Gilma De Leon.

Week 1 – First Week

This is a guest post by 2022 DEI Biocollections Summer Scholars Program alum, Iran Esquivel.

What did I think about my experiences with the DEI Scholars program?

This is a guest post by 2022 DEI Biocollections Summer Scholars Program alum, Tommy Thiatmaja.