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Habitat for Humanity Grants Intern
No full textMy internship this summer was with Habitat for Humanity of Whatcom County. Habitat Whatcom is an affiliate of Habitat for Humanity International, which operates in communities around the country and world. Habitat Whatcom’s main goal is ensuring everyone has a decent place to live. This means having housing that is safe, affordable, adequately sized, and accessible. To accomplish this goal, Habitat partners with low-to-moderate-income residents, both building new homes and repairing old ones, increasing the amount of quality affordable housing available. In addition to providing housing help, Habitat Whatcom also operates a store on Cornwall Avenue in Bellingham, provides a variety of volunteer opportunities for the community and is currently developing the Nooksack Youth Center in Eastern Whatcom County
Yukon River Inter-Tribal Watershed Council (YRITWC) Internship
No full textThis summer, I had the privilege of interning with the Yukon River Inter-Tribal Watershed Council (YRITWC) through the Anchorage Conservation Foundations’ Ted Smith Conservation grant. YRITWC is a non-profit organization based out of Anchorage AK that was formed to support Tribes and First Nations within the Yukon watershed meet their local and trans-boundary environmental goals. YRITWC is guided by their mission statement to “continue the clean up and preservation of the Yukon River for the protection of our own and future generations of our Tribes/First Nations and for the continuation of our traditional Native way of life,” and a 50-year goal of being able to drink directly from the Yukon River. During my time as an environmental science intern this summer, I gained hands-on experience directly related to both my internship-specific learning objectives and my coursework at Western Washington University within the Environmental Studies undergraduate program
Wy\u27east Wildlands LLC Wildlands Firefighter Intern
No full textIn July of 2025 I completed an internship with Wy’east Wildlands LLC, a wildland firefighting contractor. Wy’east Wildlands is based out of The Dalles, Oregon, and works with many federal, local, and contractor crews who aid in wildfire suppression. The company deploys crews all over the nation but does most of its work in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana. For my experience, I was deployed on a type 2 hand crew in Lyle, WA, working only 10 miles from our base of operations. This placed me directly on the frontline of the Burdoin wildfire, where I was tasked with one of the most physically and mentally demanding jobs in my life. This work provided me with experience in wildfire behavior, landscape interactions, and resource management
The Intervention Worked, But Did It Help? An Examination of the Pros and Cons of Applied Behavior Analysis for Autism Spectrum Disorder
Get PDFThis research aims to evaluate the issues people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) raise about Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA). ASD is a neurobiological disorder in early brain development that manifests as impairments with social interaction and as restricted, repetitive, and stereotypical behaviors and interests (Mintz, 2017). Comorbidities often include language or intellectual impairments, sleep disturbances, epilepsy, depression, and self-injury. ABA is the oldest, most common, and most researched early intervention for ASD (Alotaibi, 2016). ABA has been shown to reduce negative behaviors and help to develop positive ones, which can improve quality of life for people with ASD. Opponents of ABA argue that ABA creates these behavioral changes in a way that is harmful and takes away freedom of choice, especially for children. These opponents also highlight other, potentially more effective interventions, and point out that ABA is time-intensive and expensive for families. Overall, while ABA is effective in reducing and replacing challenging behaviors associated with ASD, the process of undergoing an ABA intervention is harmful to participants
Reconcili-action in Higher Education
Get PDFIncreasingly, universities have been seen as sites for practicing decolonization work. Examples include the introduction of Land-based curricula, tribal relationship building, and the offering of critical Indigenous studies courses. However, universities remain spaces with deep colonial foundations. This paper summarizes a recent publication in Higher Education, by the same authors, offering a description of the challenges and insights gained through attempted decolonial reconcili-actiona work within this imperfect environment. We critically examine the conception, implementation, and lasting impact of a course offered at Western Washington University (WWU), located in Washington State on the ancestral territory of the Lummi and Nooksack peoples.
The “Socio-ecology and Reconcili-action in the Northern Salish Sea” course wove together Land-based learning and relationship-building to engage students in reconciliation. We worked specifically with the ɬaʔəmen (Tla’amin) Nation, located in British Columbia, and included classroom and virtual work in Bellingham and a field trip to the Nation’s traditional territory near qathet Regional District (so called Powell River). Two settler students and a settler instructor reflect on the course through a series of vignettes culminating in a list of learning commitments: to learn from a diversity of peoples, especially Indigenous community members; to learn with gratitude, respect, and reciprocity, and without fear of making mistakes; and to actively apply our knowledge to further reconciliation and decolonization. These commitments are offered as a starting point for other members of the higher education community who recognize their responsibility to advance reconciliation and decolonization
The Gannenmono on Hawaiian Sugar Plantations: Japanese Contact Labor during an Era of Emancipation, 1868-1871
Get PDFThis thesis analyzes the first experiment of Japanese contract labor on Hawaiian sugar plantations, connecting their presence with the shift from enslaved labor to free and contracted labor throughout the nineteenth century. Drawing inspiration from sugar societies in the Americas, Protestant missionaries and foreigners from the United States and Europe wanted to establish a plantation society reliant on Asian contract labor in Hawai‘i. The experiences of the gannenmono (first-year people) reveal how they resisted abuse from sugar planters and foiled this plan through their outright refusal to work, legal challenges, and pleas to the Meiji government
Comparing primary production and vertical export of the picophytoplankton Synechococcus in the Northern Gulf of Alaska
Get PDFThe Northern Gulf of Alaska (NGA) is a productive subarctic ecosystem that supports a robust food web including many ecologically and commercially important fish, bird, and mammal species. Especially in summer, picophytoplankton (\u3c 3 µm) can be an important component of the producer community at the base of this food web. Current paradigms imply that picophytoplankton do not contribute significantly to carbon export to deeper waters. However, recent findings in the Gulf of Alaska show that summer phytoplankton communities can be associated with high vertical exports. This study\u27s objective was to compare estimates of picophytoplankton primary productivity and vertical export in the NGA, using the abundant picocyanobacteria Synechococcus spp. as the model organism. The primary production, grazing rates, abundance, pigment content, distribution, and vertical export rates of Synechococcus were studied during a summer 2023 oceanographic research cruise to the region. We conducted on-deck incubation experiments and sediment trap deployments, with fluorometry and flow cytometry used to assess Synechococcus growth rates and quantify the pigment phycoerythrin as a biomarker for Synechococcus export. Primary production showed cross-shelf gradients associated with iron availability. Stations furthest offshore had lower iron concentrations, cell abundance and primary productivity than stations nearshore and on the shelf break. Export ratios ranged from 4%-14% across stations, such that Synechococcus export was a small but significant portion Synechococcus production in summer 2023. Fecal pellets and aggregates were the main mechanism of vertical transport, with fecal pellets more important closer to shore. Phytoplankton communities are predicted to shift to dominance by smaller phytoplankton, including picophytoplankton, as ocean warming continues. Understanding the relationships between primary productivity and vertical export of picophytoplankton is critical to understanding the ecosystem of the NGA and for predicting how much material will be transported to the benthic ecosystem under future scenarios
The Theory of Nomads: Home in the Wake of Diaspora
Get PDFThe project, The Theory of Nomads: Home in the Wake of Diaspora explores what home means beyond geography when living in diaspora. The project argues that the nomad; a person who exists in diaspora, must constantly dis/embody the word home and the ontological ideas that surround it. Intertwined with theory, film, personal experience, poetry, and more this project allows for different forms of lingual expression by creating a multi-modal framework. It complicates how the nomad as a positionality and praxis, navigates home through governmental corruption, the living archive, ghostly existence, and what it means to be in love in a colonized world.
This project provides the first two chapters of this novel in progress. The word nomad functions as a positionality that navigates diaspora. For the nomad, it is broken down into four different forms of transformation: The Nomad, The Wanderer, The Ghost, and The Dreamer. Each chapter focuses on different forms of close reading analysis such as the film Stalker directed by Andrei Tarkovsky (chapter 2), Babel written by R.F Kuang (chapter 3), and Poeta en San Francisco written by Barbara Jane Reyes. As this project grows, this project will start to ground itself in the Filipina American Diaspora or Transnational Diaspora. Using these different forms of artwork, it allows to decenter whiteness in correlation to diaspora.
Ultimately, this project enters the conversation of Diasporic Studies by highlighting the tension between optimism and pessimism when it comes to stories of diaspora, exile, and loneliness. The nomad is a person/positionality/praxis that suspends what it means to exist in a colonial world. By giving language to the conversation of home, it is an active form of resistance that starts at the language level in the hopes of turning into a praxis of resistance that enters everyday life
Team Building Grounded in Experiential Learning Theory, Relatedness, Cohesion, and Passing Performance in a Newly Formed Group of Intermediate Soccer Players
Get PDFThe basic psychological need of relatedness (i.e., a sense of belonging; Deci & Ryan, 2002) has had positive relationships with performance outcomes (Gillet et al., 2009; Raabe & Zakrajsek, 2017) and perceived performance (Lourenço et al., 2022), yet the effects of relatedness on objective team performance is limited (Campbell, 2018). Although, a close relationship between relatedness and the widely studied topic of social cohesion has been found (Erikstad et al., 2018; Nascimento Júnior et al., 2019). Team-building interventions have successfully increased team cohesion on intercollegiate sport teams (e.g., Stevens & Bloom, 2003), yet there are limited team building interventions that are based on theory such as experiential learning (Kolb, 1984). Therefore, the purpose of the present study was to explore the effects of a team-building activity with theoretically grounded processing on relatedness and cohesion. Participants were nine adult male soccer players (Mage = 19.78) who engaged in a passing drill in a pretest/posttest design as part of a newly formed group. The intervention was a 20-minute, team-building activity with experiential learning model guided processing (Kolb, 1984) that targeted the basic psychological need of relatedness (Deci & Ryan, 2002). At posttest, participants had increased perceived cohesion (p = .006, d = 1.22) and relatedness satisfaction (p = .007, d = 1.19), and decreased relatedness frustration (p = \u3c .001, d = 1.79). Furthermore, there was a strong correlation between relatedness satisfaction and perceived cohesion at pretest (r = .75) and at posttest (r = .71), and a medium correlation between relatedness frustration and perceived cohesion at both pretest (r = -.63) and posttest (r = -.62). Lastly, an exploratory, non-inferential statistics analysis indicated that objective performance on a soccer passing drill may have decreased after the intervention and the majority of participants (55.55%) perceived a subjective increase in their performance. The results of the study indicate that a team building activity with guided experiential learning processing may cause positive changes in relatedness and cohesion in male soccer players, but further research is needed on effects on performance
Crustal architecture and earthquake rupture dynamics along the Queen Charlotte Fault: Insights from marine seismic imaging
Get PDFThe Queen Charlotte Fault (QCF) accommodates right-lateral transform motion between the Pacific and North American plates offshore southeast Alaska and British Columbia, generating Mw\u3e7 earthquakes every few decades. Despite its being the longest and fastest-slipping ocean-continent transform boundary on Earth, physical controls on earthquake behavior and deformation along the QCF remain poorly understood due to the fault’s remote offshore setting. Recent bathymetric mapping reveals several fault step-overs associated with localized zones of compression and extension that often coincide with earthquake rupture terminations, suggesting they may act as barriers to slip. Some step-overs also lie adjacent to active volcanic fields, raising questions about their role in melt transport and regional magmatism. Here, I use streamer-recorded wide-angle refraction data from the 2021 Transform Obliquity along the Queen Charlotte and Earthquake Study (TOQUES) experiment to construct a P-wave velocity model along a ~340 km transect on the North American plate parallel to the QCF. I focus on the structure of the continental shelf, including regions adjacent to three fault step-overs, with the goals of characterizing the distribution of sediment and bedrock adjacent to the fault, and searching for signs of previously undiscovered young volcanic activity. The final velocity model reveals a two-layer crust, with low-velocity sediments overlying high-velocity basement, and shows no evidence of low velocity anomalies consistent with melt. Shallow high-velocity anomalies align spatially with the step-overs, indicating a potential structural control on fault segmentation. I interpret these anomalies as solidified intermediate to mafic plutons, likely formed in a submarine volcanic arc and later accreted to the margin. These findings are supported by complementary marine geophysical datasets, and suggest that pre-existing lithologic heterogeneity influences both QCF geometry and earthquake behavior