Hi! I’m Liliana, and I’m so excited for this trip and the chance to learn and explore someplace I never would have gotten to go otherwise!

I can’t believe that we’re going to be there so soon! At the beginning of the summer this trip felt like it was ages away but the time flew so quickly and now it’s only 2 days away! I am expecting this trip to be pretty intense, a whole course in such a short time sounds like a lot, but I think I’ll be so caught up in the excitement of everything we’re going to learn that it won’t even feel like work. I’ve done the pre-trip readings and presentations and everything I’ve learned about from that makes me even more excited to finally see what we’ve been reading and learning about in real life. I am especially excited for Glover’s Reef, I’ve always loved marine biology and the ocean but I’ve never been snorkeling before. I have some basic familiarity with ocean ecosystems and organisms from being an intern at the New England Aquarium, but my knowledge is pretty limited to New England, since I live in Boston. I can’t wait to experience a whole new part of the world and everything new that lives there! My taxon is crustacea for that part of the trip, so I will probably be digging through sand and looking under rocks to see if I can find anything cool, I especially love tidepools, looking into a tidepool is like staring into a portal to an entirely different world!

I will admit I’m a little bit nervous to travel internationally. I haven’t been anywhere but Boston and Houston since COVID started, and before that I hardly ever went outside the U.S., and if we did it was probably driving through parts of Canada. I’m not too worried though because even if I’m nervous I think there will be plenty going on to distract and interest me. I can’t wait to meet everyone else on this trip and get to know them better, and to learn from our professors and guest speakers and from everyone’s presentations! Also shout-out to my high school teachers who really pushed my love of the ocean and ecology! I hope you’ll follow along with us on this adventure!