Changing Oceans Semester Program: An Intensive Academic Research Experience
The ocean controls global climate, provides food for billions of people, and contains extensive biodiversity. But the ocean is changing and changing fast. The Changing Oceans program at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in East Boothbay, Maine, affords students the opportunity to work side by side with research scientists who are trying to understand what's happening in the ocean. This fall-semester, hands-on research and field experience is open to qualifying students from Colby College and partnering colleges and universities.

Throughout the semester, students work with cultured and field-collected microbes and use cutting-edge oceanographic techniques, including genomic tools, remote sensing, and single-cell analysis. The semester combines course work and research at the laboratory's state-of-the-art campus, where students are embedded in laboratories of senior research scientists. The program is focused on ocean science within a changing global climate. Implications for public policy are explored for each topic. Students complete an independent research project, which includes the development of a research plan, as well as experiments and analysis, under the guidance of a faculty mentor. Students present their work at a research symposium during the final week of the program. The experience provides training in science and, for many, their first published scientific citation.

Changing Oceans at a Glance
Four laboratory courses encompassing ocean science
Six one-day oceanographic cruises
Intensive independent research under the mentorship of a Bigelow laboratory senior research scientist
Small program with two to one Ph.D.-to-student ratio
Fourteen week program during fall semester
Sixteen academic credits, Colby transcript