Kaitlyn Bretz

No one gets through life or achieves success without the help and support of other people. Academia itself relies on a network of individuals dedicated to expanding the boundaries of human knowledge and establishing mentor-mentee relationships to foster skill development and pass on a researcher’s legacy through their students. As an undergraduate student, I am just beginning to network and establish mentor-mentee relationships with current USC faculty members and researchers. I have been lucky in securing research positons with several research faculty, which has allowed me to develop and foster mentor relationships on an academia front. However, this type of relationship often goes beyond academia and research: in today’s society, it is often not what you know, but who you know that allows people to get jobs and succeed throughout their careers, so strong mentor-mentee relationships provide more employment opportunities for the mentee. Having a strong support system from early on in my career will therefore not only help me in my academic goals and career opportunities, but in designing and maintaining conservation projects and conducting research experiments.

 

Networking is the idea of having multiple objects connected to many other objects, which are connected to even more objects, and so on and so forth. A network acts as a support system, as the people I know and have a relationship with are generally people I can rely on and learn from. This idea is not far from the basic idea I learned in ENVR 201: Environmental Science & Policy I, BIOL 301: Evolution & Ecology, and ENHS: Introduction to Environmental Health: energy webs are what form the basis of any ecosystem and as energy is never created nor destroyed, it cycles through the ecosystem, connected from one organism to the next. Having an expansive energy network allows the environment to have a support system or a sort of fail-safe: if one organism declines or disappears from the energy web, an environment with a large network and many connections will be able to survive, whereas an environment with a small network would likely falter and lose its energy transfers, effectively dying off. I have applied this same idea to relationships within human society, especially that in academia. I have discovered that the more people I know, the more likely I am to succeed in my field, as I can turn to more people for help and inspiration.

 

Larger networks also play an integral part in establishing project collaborations and building scientific institutes. I began working with Dr. Tim Mousseau in the Chernobyl and Fukushima Research Initiatives (cricket.biol.sc.edu) in October 2013 during my first semester at USC. Dr. Mousseau’s projects are strongly rooted in international partnerships and collaborations, and he has many contacts in Ukraine and Japan that allow him access to otherwise forbidden places near nuclear reactors, as well as several connections with nuclear scientists and ecologists in France, Finland, Italy, and the United States. This broad network of contacts is what allows Dr. Mousseau to conduct his research and support the many undergraduate students in his lab, including me. My project, which focuses on quantifying morphological mutations caused by radiation contamination in butterfly species from Chernobyl and Fukushima, relies on Dr. Mousseau’s connections to gather and transport my specimens and to verify my statistical analyses (abstract).

 

Project managers and policy writers also rely on the establishment of a broad support system. In POLI 478: Environmental Policy, I learned about the theory of policy streams, where policy is created through the interaction of three types of actors: politics, which include generalists (e.g., politicians), policy, which include experts in their respective fields (e.g., scientists), and problems, that includes actors who bring attention to the issue (e.g., advocates) (notes). Managers and politicians are generalists, meaning that they have very basic knowledge in a large number of areas. However, they rely on experts in particular fields in order to make decisions for their projects and/or policies. Thus, in order to be effective at their job, generalists need to have a large network of experts to help them make decisions in a wide number of disciplines. My success as leader of a research team developing conservation strategies will rely on my ability in part to act like a generalist and identify people necessary for my project and make the best decision for the environment and local communities. Today as a student, I know though my interdisciplinary focus that I will not be able to be an expert in all of my fields of interest, so I too will have to continuously rely on different individuals who serve as experts in their respective fields.

 

My future goals include earning a graduate degree and obtaining research grants, which means it is imperative for me to network and establish a support system early on in my career. By taking political science, public health, and basic ecology classes, I understand the fundamental ideas behind energy transfer and the role of experts in a society, but by working in research labs I see the importance of support systems firsthand. Even as I apply for grants and programs as an undergraduate I am relying on my mentors to provide me with recommendation letters and career/life advice. As Isaac Newton once said, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”;  today, people have lifted me up and allowed me to see further than if I had been left by myself, and through my support system I can learn to become a better mentor and also lift people up in the future.