Fourth Internship Experience

On Monday, January 6, I visited the HMNS again for my internship. This was the first time that I worked independently because Christine, my mentor, had to do some more work. She helped me gather materials and take the top off of the tank. She then went to go do her work and I started to clean rocks. I re-cleaned some of the rocks that I had previously cleaned. I did this just to make sure that all of the flatworms and other junk was off of them. I then moved on to cleaning a new rock. This rock was pretty big so it took me a longer time to clean. I cleaned off most of the junk in the first ten minutes because a lot of the junk on the rock were plants. The plants were pretty long so I could just pluck them off. After most of the big junk was cleaned off, I had to start cleaning the smaller junk on the rock. This took a really long time since I could just pull this small junk off of the rock, I had to scrub it really hard with a toothbrush. After finishing this rock, I placed it back into the tank. As I was doing this Christine had just arrived to help me clean up. We cleaned the surrounding area of water and then took all our materials back down to where they belonged. I felt like I learned a ton this time at my internship because I had to put my skills to the test, since I didn't have the option to ask Christine how to do this or that.