Rockwood Students Gain Environmental Science Field Experience During PIE Summer Internship

Marquette High senior Grace Jiang remembers being a big fan of nature documentaries when she was younger. She was fascinated by the exotic animal and plant species featured in far-flung locales like Antarctica and the Galapagos Islands.

Watching these programs helped her realize two things: one, that she would like to study animals and plants someday and two, that she didn’t necessarily have to travel to the Galapagos in order to do it.

“All that nature and environment there that’s worth saving, it’s also worth saving here,” she said. “In Missouri, there is so much wildlife, native wildflowers and plants that people tend to overlook. Studying this path is getting me to focus on what surrounds me every day and what I walk past every day. I realized I could make an impact by dedicating myself to nature that’s around me and trying to help conserve that.”

Jiang and fellow Marquette senior Marina French gained extensive work in the conservation field in their own backyard this summer through their Rockwood Partners in Education (PIE) Summer Internship program work at the Litzsinger Road Ecology Center (LREC).

The PIE Summer Internship program provides students with career exploration opportunities going into their senior year of high school, allowing them to gain practical, real-world experience in a field of interest by partnering with professionals. Located in Ladue and managed by the Missouri Botanical Garden, the LREC is a 39-acre study center that includes a variety of forest, prairie and creek habitats.

Like Jiang, French said she has a strong interest in working locally to make a positive impact on the world.

“As a kid, you find this problem and think, ‘How can I solve it?’” French said. “It’s a drive to do something good. It’s something that grows in you, and you’re really passionate about it. If you can do one good thing, it really fills you with a passion for this job.”

Over the summer, French and Jiang worked three days a week in the field, gaining hands-on experience in environmental and biological sciences.

On Tuesdays, they would snip, gather and clean seeds to remove debris and make them easier for re-planting, as well as learn about seed sizes, plant structure and dispersal strategies. Thursdays normally involved phenology walks to identify plants around the property and determine when they are in bloom to help with future planting and growth. On Fridays, they would do more seed cleaning as well as removing invasive species.

The interns also enjoyed learning about herbarium specimens, collections of preserved plants used for scientific study. For French – who is also interested in fashion – getting a close-up view of the art of nature was inspiring.

“It’s something I wouldn’t have thought about coming into this,” she said. “There’s a whole library of plants you can look at. That really ignited my passion, and I would never have known about that without this experience. It’s something I would have only learned during PIE.”

“Environmental science is a field that can branch really easily into different sectors,” Jiang added. “You can do illustration, art, law and ethics, technology. With the herbarium preservation, there’s very much a historical aspect. Knowing there’s still a sector of people working to merge history with environmental and biological sciences is very interesting to me.”

French is undecided on what she would like to study after graduation, and Jiang has honed in on wildlife biology. They took AP Biology together at Marquette last year and are both taking AP Environmental Science as seniors.

They both are grateful for the opportunity the LREC provided them to further explore how they can use their own personal sets of skills and interests to make a difference.

“This job has a lot of very friendly people, and you get to know so much about them,” Jiang said. “There are a lot of paths in environmental studies, and this helped me learn I have flexible options. At the beginning, I was kind of stressed out about there being only one path and you have to get on it as fast as possible. Now that I’ve talked to people, I realize that a lot of them come from very different backgrounds of study. It shows that they can all still end up in the job they want.”