NOAA Lieutenant Junior Grade Emily Ruhl Reflects on DESG Internship
As she finished up her time as a Master’s student at the University of Delaware in 2018, Emily Ruhl wasn’t exactly sure to do next.
She knew that she wanted to make a positive impact on her local community and she also knew that she wanted to get back to being involved with environmental education.
Luckily, an internship through Delaware Sea Grant (DESG) afforded her both of those opportunities.
Ruhl began her internship in the summer of 2018 after receiving her Master’s degree in marine biosciences at UD’s School of Marine Science and Policy. At that time, Ed Lewandowski, DESG's community development specialist and coordinator of UD's Sustainable Coastal Communities Initiative, connected her with the Delaware Center for the Inland Bays.
“Ed Lewandowski was trying to get DESG interns more out into the community and so I helped out the Center for the Inland Bays as an extra set of hands,” said Ruhl. “I helped them with some field work, some of their weekly data collections out in the bays and then I was also tasked with helping to compile data and a white paper analysis on living shorelines.”
In addition, Ruhl led tours through an organization called Sun Otter Tours which held ecotours for small groups.
“I led some of those tours and I partnered with Sun Otter and did demonstrations on oyster filtration. We would also do marsh walks and coastal walks, we talked about horseshoe crabs and whatever we would find during the walks,” said Ruhl. “With the internship, that was probably my favorite thing to do because I was an environmental educator before my time at UD with the North Carolina aquariums and then also at Cape Henlopen State Park.”
While Ruhl enjoyed her time as graduate school, she was heavily focused on her research and her classwork and wasn’t able to concentrate much on education or community outreach. She loved how the internship with DESG allowed her to go back to her roots as an educator.
NOAA Corps Officer
After her internship with DESG ended, Ruhl went to work for the Army Corps of Engineers in Mississippi for two years as a research assistant and, having had about five years of research experience at that point, she realized that she wanted to have a career that was more hands-on and out in the field.
That led her to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Corps, one of the eight federal uniformed services of the United States.
Ruhl joined the NOAA Corps in 2020 and after completing basic training at the Coast Guard Academy, she joined the fleet as an Ensign in the NOAA Commissioned Officer Corps.
In her role, Ruhl was stationed on a fishing vessel in San Diego, California for two years where she learned how to operate the vessel and supported all the projects that took place.
The NOAA Corps has a fleet of 15 research vessels and on that ship in particular during her two-year stint, they worked with the Southwest Fisheries Science Center on a variety of projects such as a juvenile rockfish recruitment project, a coastal pelagic species survey where they trawled for species in these historic target areas, sampling plankton and taking water samples using CTDs.
“Whatever the scientists need to get done, we facilitate that happening,” said Ruhl. “I’ve found that research can be so slow and I think I’m an impatient person. The NOAA Corps allows me to be out on the ship collecting all the data—and doing fieldwork was always my favorite part of research. That is pretty much the bulk of what we do. We’re sailing almost 200 days a year collecting whatever data that they need us to get.”
The way NOAA Corps is set up, Corps members are on a sea assignment for two to three years and then they rotate to a land assignment.
Ruhl is currently on a land assignment in Miami at the Southeast Fisheries Science Center in the Marine Mammal and Turtle Division where she serves as the Operations Manager.
In her role, she does a lot of administrative work, helping with purchasing and organizing things for the division and assisting the scientists, sometimes as an extra set of hands for fieldwork. She also serves as an officer in charge of the NOAA Corps small vessels stationed at the center and will be able to sail on the NOAA ship Gordon Gunter, the research vessel primarily used to do larger vessel surveys.
“I got here in March so I’m still pretty new and figuring out everything but it’s been a great experience,” said Ruhl. “After these three years on land, I can go back out to sea as the Operations Officer on a different NOAA vessel.”
The research background she gained at UD and the skills she learned through her DESG internship help Ruhl as she is able to communicate better with the scientists on-board the NOAA vessels.
“It’s nice to have that type of cohesion on the ship because everyone in NOAA Corps is in a totally different line office of NOAA than the scientists,” said Ruhl. “We’re all part of NOAA but we have different goals and objectives and technically the scientists are like our customers, which is an interesting dynamic. I think having the research background definitely helps me communicate better with the scientists and being able to understand what they need to have happen.”
As for her time as a DESG intern, Ruhl said she wanted to emphasize how much she enjoyed her time with the organization.
“It was a great experience and I really appreciate the people at DESG and how supportive they are of the graduate students. I would encourage current students to seek them out and use them as resources because the DESG professionals have been around for a long time and they know people,” said Ruhl. “Delaware is small and they have the connections that students could really use as a good resource for career advice or for internships, like what I was able to do.”
Article by Adam Thomas