Journal 6: Professionalism, Gratitude & Insights

My service learning experience at Zooniverse has been very rewarding. Not only did I have over 2,000 classification on my own with this research project, but we finished almost all of the 22 workflows! There are only 3 left to finish! I am so happy and proud of the success of this project. This research will allow us to better assess the role that killer whale predation pressure has on the endangered western stock of Steller sea lions. One leadership insight used throughout my volunteer service is communication. We had to use communication when discussing different topics, especially when we saw something out of the ordinary in the pictures. Or when classifying, and there was something that looked like a killer whale but we did not know for sure, so we had others look at it as well and start a discussion about it. Another leadership insight was that this volunteer insight was a very inclusive environment. I had no prior experience in using zooniverse, but whenever I had any questions people were very kind to answer, even if they were easy questions for them to answer. I loved the Zooniverse environment. Another example of leadership insight was the team of this project. The team/main researchers that created this project were, Alexa Hasselman, Michelle LaRue and Kim Goetz. They did an amazing job at explaining the project goal, its importance, the study area, remote camera details, study subjects, as well as why they need our help. Another great leadership insight of zooniverse was explaining how we would classify killer whales as well as identify other useful information. They made it easy by pointing us to use the following field guides and tutorials to assist in completing this task. The last leadership insight used was showing us the results of this research. Showing us the results after all of us have put in all the hard work of classifying and have great discussions was just the cherry on top for volunteering on this research project.

Formal Thank You Letter.