A Geologist With Her Toes in the Sand: An Internship at Sandy Hook

Geoscientists-in-the-Parks intern Jin-Si Over measures a benchmark at the Sandy Hook Unit, Gateway National Recreation Area. NPS.

Jin-Si Over caught her love of geology from her father, a geologist and paleontologist who taught it at a university. She grew up in New York's Finger Lakes, far from the sea, but at five, digging her toes into the sand on a family beach trip, she decided she never wanted to live away from it.

The road to the parks

She studied geology, with a minor in oceanography, at the University of North Carolina, graduating in 2016, then crossed the continent for a master's in earth and ocean sciences at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, finishing in 2019 with a grounding in microfossil paleoecology and Quaternary paleoclimate.

In no hurry to settle into a career, she wanted to keep learning, and found the Geoscientists-in-the-Parks (GIP) programme, which gives aspiring geoscientists and natural resource scientists short, paid internships in monitoring, research and science communication; the National Park Service has run it with the Stewards Individual Placement Program since 2016. The post she wanted, a coastal geomorphology assistant, matched nearly everything she had studied, and in spring 2019 she joined the NPS Northeast Coastal and Barrier Network at Gateway National Recreation Area on the New Jersey coast.

Measuring a changing coast

Measuring changes in shoreline topography with an all-terrain rover rod carrying GPS. NPS.

Living in park housing at Gateway's Sandy Hook Unit, she worked with the Sandy Hook Cooperative Research Program, led by Norbert Psuty of Rutgers University, which monitors coastal topography for the network: gathering and processing field data and mapping shoreline and dune change, so park managers can see coming threats to natural and cultural resources. She saw why on her first day: Superstorm Sandy, which had barely touched her in upstate New York, had struck this very park, and she lived and worked in buildings repaired after it, among others still showing damage years later. That, she has said, gave her a deeper sense of why the work matters.

She credits co-workers who were easy to work with, always ready to help, and made her feel like a real contributor rather than a desk worker. With them she learned to use RTK surveying equipment to record shoreline position, landforms and topographic change, along with Python programming, report writing and summarising data for a government agency, GIS skills she sees as a real advantage in a job search.

Paleontology had long been her goal, but she came to see coastal work as more relevant to today's pressures of sea-level rise, climate change and possibly stronger storms: baseline data, gathered as hurricanes come and go, let managers make decisions now and in future on the best science.

Casting a shadow while collecting data on the beach. Over/NPS.

The whole process

Her favourite part was taking part in everything, from studying aerial images and turning numbers into final figures in the office to seeing the beach and dunes differently while collecting data on them. The job posting had promised long unsupervised walks on the beach, and it delivered: walking the Sandy Hook shoreline minutes after sunrise on a beautiful day, she worked barefoot. The internship showed her she could build a career with the Park Service doing exactly what she wanted, as a geologist with her toes in the sand.

Update: Over has since joined the U.S. Geological Survey's Coastal and Marine Science Center in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, as a geographer, working on structure-from-motion products and on coastal hazard assessments and forecasts for Hurricane Florence. A PDF of this article is available.

Sources

• National Park Service, Northeast Coastal and Barrier Network, "An aspiring geologist gains a well-grounded skill set from the Geoscientists-in-the-Parks (GIP) internship program." https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/ncbn-gip-intern-jin-si-over.htm
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.