It’s a chilly November, but things are heating up here at the Outer Banks field site! We’ve shifted gears to focus on finals for our classes and start our products (the paper and podcast) for our Capstone project. We’re also starting to wrap up our internships!
Last Thursday, we did presentations about our internships, and I really enjoyed hearing about the work everyone’s been doing this semester! There are so many cool and interesting jobs for Environmental Studies majors, and it was great to hear and learn about some of them. It’s definitely made me more confident about graduating and finding a job!
We’ve been doing some fun things recently, too! This past Friday, we took a field trip to O’Neal’s Sea Harvest, which is a seafood wholesale business that includes a restaurant where customers can try the freshly caught seafood. I had a soft crab BLT, and it was delicious! Probably the tastiest thing I ate that week. I also had a chance to try their loaded shrimp baked potato and fried Mahi strips, which were excellent. I think that O’Neal’s may have been my favorite food experience of the semester so far (with the oyster roast at Johanna’s as a close runner-up)!
We learned a lot about fisheries on the field trip, as well. Sara Mirabilio from the NC Sea Grant showed us around the seafood processing facility and taught us a lot about how fisheries are managed and regulated, as well as some fun facts about seafood! For example, I had no idea that soft crabs are not a separate species of crab, but are actually blue crabs that are harvested after molting, when they are still soft. In addition, they have to be sold live, and are refrigerated so that they stay in a state of stasis before being sold. Sara, thanks so much for showing us around the fish house and teaching us about it!
This semester in the Outer Banks has been my favorite in college so far. I feel that I’ve learned much about living on the coast and gained a lot of extremely valuable experiences in the field of Environmental Studies. I’m so thankful to our teachers, internship mentors, CAB, and everyone else who’s worked to make this semester so successful and fun!