A popular summer freshwater science course brought together students and faculty from opposite sides of Wisconsin for intensive hands-on lab and field work.
In its third offering, Special Topics in Freshwater Science Laboratory and Field Techniques at UW-River Falls expanded to include faculty and students from UW-Green Bay.
The two-week summer course gives undergraduates opportunities to learn and practice proper lab and field techniques before they enter the workforce. UW-River Falls faculty and staff Bahar Hassanpour and Heather Davis co-teach the course and focus on surface water and lab work. Erin Berns-Herrboldt from UW-Green Bay added expertise in groundwater sampling and analysis this year. Kathryn Hofmeister from Michigan Tech helped students with soil profile analysis.
“It was great for students to see other faculty from other campuses in this collaborative setting,” Hassanpour says. “We have different styles in teaching which added to the course.”
Five students from UW-Green Bay, seven from UW-River Falls and a summer intern from the University of Minnesota enrolled int he course. They learned everything from sampling soil with an auger to bailing and pumping a well to depth sampling water in the Mississippi River to measuring water quality parameters with a range of probes and assays.
“I wanted to take this course because it offers things that are harder to do in a traditional classroom setting. This offered a lot of practical skills,” says Adam Bruce, Water Science major from UW-Green Bay. “We have the Great Lakes, but we don’t have the Mississippi so getting to this part of the state and sampling the river was pretty amazing.”
Gaining Job Skills
Because the course focuses on practical skills, students could quickly see how they could use what they learned as they enter the job market.
Emily Rose, an Environmental Engineering major at UW-River Falls, is interested in a career in environmental restoration and remediation. She felt taking the course would improve her field and lab skills as a research assistant intern at UW-River Falls and beyond.
“[The course will] really help me in the rest of my internship and also throughout the rest of my life depending on the career I choose whether it’s field work, lab work or a combination of the two,” she says.
Natalie Haberman, an Environmental Science major from the University of Minnesota, took the course as part of the Freshwater@UW Summer Research Opportunities Program. The statewide undergraduate research program is funded by the Freshwater Collaborative and coordinated by UW-Madison.
“Part of the class that I really enjoyed was being able to go into the field and do the sampling. It recreated what I would be doing on a job,” she says. “I can talk about this experience with future employers in interviews. That’s a really valuable experience I will take from this course.”
Hassanpour and colleagues from UW-River Falls and UW-Madison developed the course in 2022 with funding from the Freshwater Collaborative of Wisconsin. Continued funding from the collaborative pays for student scholarships to cover course fees and lodging. The grant also allows students who take the course to be hired as interns. One Green Bay student and five UW-River Falls students were hired as interns for this academic year.