Internship with USC Sea Grant 

Yodi P., Spring 2024 

Hello! My name is Yodi and I’m a Senior majoring in Environmental Studies. For the Spring 2024 semester, I got the opportunity to intern with USC Sea Grant. Sea Grant is one of 34 programs under the NOAA’s National Sea Grant Program and here at USC, their focus is on the urban ocean and solving a diverse range of issues that have arisen due to urbanization and a developed coastline including managing people, marine life, and natural resources.  

 My work at Sea Grant focused on the Long-Term Monitoring Program and Experiential Training for Students (LiMPETS) Program. This program is a community science approach to monitoring the biology in both rocky intertidal and sandy beach ecosystems. Therefore, I got to be out in the field quite a lot at the White Point tide pools in San Pedro and Paradise Cove in Malibu doing quadrat surveying, and total organism counts/size measurements. The other aspect of my job was human impact surveying which consisted of observing how the tidepools are used by the public. This allows us to monitor how direct human activity and occupation of these areas affects them over time. 

I’ve really enjoyed my time with Sea Grant as it’s given me a thorough introduction to fieldwork and allowed me to learn so much about urban ecology and environmental monitoring. Also being able to foster community engagement in these projects was extremely rewarding and inspiring.