Mary Kate Swenarton started college expecting to become an engineer. But she soon realized she was missing something. It was the outdoors. “I realized I would be spending much time in the office,” she says. She quickly changed to ecology — a field where she could study how organisms interact with their environments.
Now, she’s spending a summer at the Toolik Field Station in Alaska. She’s what’s called a “research specialist” — someone who spends time carrying out experiments and collecting data under the direction of another scientist. Swenarton is working for Heidi Golden, a graduate student from Connecticut University in Storrs.
Swenarton came to Toolik after finishing her Master's degree at North Florida University in Jacksonville. There she’d studied lionfish, an invasive species eating up local fish. She came to Alaska to collect data on a species of fish called Arctic grayling. She also studies the streams and rivers where the fish live.
On a typical day, Swenarton hikes out to specially choose streams in the tundra—the treeless, cold ecosystem where much of the deep soil remains frozen all year round. There, she’ll spend her day wading up to her waist in a stream with a tape measure to measure the water's length, width and depth. She’ll also catch tiny fish with a net.
Toolik Field Station is a tiny town which exists to support the 60 to 100 scientists that work there every summer. It’s located on a large gravel area right off the Dalton Highway—one of the only roads going through the North Slope Borough, which is at the top of Alaska. It's a several-hour drive to the nearest gas station, let alone the nearest town. While there’s no cell-phone reception, there’s Internet access.
Spending so much time here can be hard. “This isn’t a typical summer,” Swenarton says. “In general, you might feel like you miss out a lot with your family and friends.” The hardest part for her, she says, is that her dog can’t come to Alaska, too. “I really struggle not being with her.”
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