60 second story: scuba diving

Jenny Steinberg, senior, spent 25 days in the Bahamas this summer, but not on an average vacation. She spent these weeks at marine biology camp.

“We stayed at Gerace Research Center in San Salvador in The Bahamas,” Steinberg said. “The trip was 21 days for people who already had their open water certification. Since I didn’t, I went down four days earlier [than others]. During those four days, we learned the skills we needed to get our open water certification. We played games every day and basically went scuba diving daily since we were getting our advanced open water certification. Almost daily we would have a lesson in marine biology then be assigned a journal due the next day.”

Since this was an academic summer camp, it is taken for college credit. During the course, students took a midterm, final, and conducted a research study project.

“My group and I chose to focus on the amount of healthy versus diseased coral in the reefs we dove at [for our research study project],” Steinberg said. “We chose this because in one of our lessons, we learned about what is happening to the reefs and once we found out about this and looked up common Caribbean diseases, we started noticing a lot of it on our regular dives.”

Although Steinberg learned many skills that will aid her future in marine biology, she believes the most valuable lesson was learning to appreciate the ocean more.

“It’s like another world down there that no one really has the chance to truly be able to experience it,” Steinberg said. “Being able to scuba dive and see all these beautiful animals and how they interact with one another was an experience I can’t describe. It’s something you have to experience yourself.”