Never fall in the water while wearing waders! That’s one of the many lessons Abby Panier, a UW-Whitewater undergraduate student, learned last summer.
Panier worked as a beach monitoring intern with UW Oshkosh, based in Manitowoc, Wisc. She collected daily water samples from 13 public beaches to evaluate recreational water safety. She tested the samples at the County Health Department. If levels of E. coli and other bacteria were too high, she put up advisories to close the beach for the day.
Her most memorable experience happened after a big storm.
“The shoreline was severely altered so it was almost unrecognizable,” she says. “I waded into Lake Michigan to take my samples, but misjudged where the drop-off was, and proceeded to fall flat on my face amid three-foot waves.”
Luckily, Panier’s survival instincts kicked in, and she made it back to shore — soaked but safe. It was a good lesson that things don’t always go as planned when working in the field.
Real-World Lessons
Some skills can only be learned outside the classroom. Funding from the Freshwater Collaborative of Wisconsin, and others, allows UW Oshkosh to leverage its Environmental Research and Innovation Center (ERIC) to provide hands-on paid summer opportunities to undergraduates throughout the state.
Greg Kleinheinz, director of the ERIC and principal investigator on the Freshwater Collaborative grant, says students gain hands-on and applied skills related to water testing and analysis. The real-world internships teach students more than technical skills.
“Students gain critical thinking and problem-solving skills as they work through situations that don’t happen in a traditional classroom,” Kleinheinz says.
Case in point? Figuring out how to maneuver through three-foot waves on Lake Michigan while wearing waders.
Diverse Training Experiences
During the 2024-25 academic year, 52 undergraduate students from 11 of the Universities of Wisconsin participated in undergraduate research and internships through UW Oshkosh’s ERIC lab.
Interns participate in a wide range of water-related services. These include
- Operating a state-certified laboratory that is open to the public for well water testing.
- Conducting comprehensive water quality monitoring for more than 60 beaches to ensure recreational water safety
- Testing and evaluating agricultural water systems, treatment, and discharge to local waterways
- Testing for emerging contaminants such as microplastics in drinking and surface waters
- Testing public water systems and drinking water from private wells
In addition to monitoring beach conditions, Panier conducted annual beach surveys for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, analyzed drinking water samples from local businesses, and recorded algal blooms and collected weekly samples to test for toxic algae.
She also learned to use a “Bebot” (beach robot) and “Pixie Drone” (water robot). This was part of a collaboration with the Great Lakes Plastic Clean Up, which involved taking the robots to beaches to collect plastic and outreach events at Meijer grocery stores to educate the public about plastic pollution.
Career Preparation
Alyssa Arch, an undergraduate at UW-Madison, participated in similar activities as one of five field research interns working in Door County. Her team collected daily samples from Door County beaches and analyzed the results at a UW Oshkosh lab in Sturgeon Bay. She oversaw quality control in the lab and led a data project designed to evaluate the historical rates of closures and advisories of the public beaches in Door County.
“My favorite experience was anytime we got to do stream water sampling with the Soil and Water Conservation Department because it gave me something new to learn,” she says. “It’s a field of water research I’m interested in, so it gave me insight as to what a future job may look like.”
In addition to technical skills, Arch says her internship enhanced her customer service skills. The lab is open to community members who bring in well water samples for testing. She learned a lot about effectively communicating with the public — a skill that will come in handy in her future career.
“I’d love to be doing some kind of freshwater research or monitoring while being able to incorporate citizen science or the community in some way,” Arch says. “This internship got me started. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do for a job, but it became clear to me as the summer went on.”
Learn about summer water internships and research opportunities.