Nathan Brand

Undergraduate Fellow

“I'm an avid fisherman, and I'm really interested in fish biology, fish hatcheries, fish behavior—stuff like that. I mean, they breathe underwater! What more could you want out of fish?

I think this internship is going to play a role in the occupation I want down the road. Right now, I would like to work with the Department of Natural Resources, Fish and Wildlife, the Department of the Interior—something along those lines on the government side.

I know that no matter what I'm doing in this field, this is going to help me out. Yeah, I'm not going out collecting data, I’m not doing the fun stuff. But it's still part of the job that I need to learn. So I think it's almost benefiting me more this summer to do the stuff that I might want to put on the back-burner.”

What has it been like to connect with your team remotely?

“It’s week six, and I think we're finally starting to warm up to each other. We know each other’s personalities and we can joke with each other. I think if we were in person, we would have been at that point two or three weeks ago. I'm more of an in-person kind of guy, so that's been a bit of a challenge.

On Fridays, the mentors for the Tick and Wildlife team give us a subject related to anti-racism to research, and then we just give our thoughts and feelings on it. It’s just opened my eyes a lot to a lot of issues that I didn’t really know about. Personally, I never knew that 83% of board members in environmental organizations were white. We were like, ‘Wow, that’s pretty screwed up.’ Like, we need to do something about this. Even though it’s not related to birds or ticks or whatever, I think that’s still an important aspect of Tyson.”

Nathan worked with Solny Adalsteinsson's Tick & Wildlife Ecology team during summer 2020. Learn more about their prescribed fire and tick-borne disease ecology research here.