Fall 2024 27 MARINE SCIENCE ADRIENE KOETT-CRONN decidedly anchored in the College of Liberal Arts, with nearly all of the college’s programs contributing to the curriculum. While the full major is designed for undergraduates with a humanities interest — about 100 will be enrolled this fall — the new MAST minor may also appeal to science students looking for a way to expand their understanding of what it means to interact with the ocean. Curious students started reaching out even before the program’s finishing touches were in place. Comsa picked up prerequisites at Portland Community College so he could enroll as one of the first MAST majors. From the start, he said, the teachers and advisors encouraged him to build skills he’d need to make himself useful. “I learned that I wanted to specialize in aquaculture, and I didn’t even know what that was when I started this,” he said. He also discovered a passion for the ethics of food production. He then won a fellowship interning with experts at the University of Maine’s Wabanaki Center as they genotyped mussels and stud- ied challenges facing Indigenous shellfish harvesters. It was a profound- ly long way from the tooth room. Unlike Comsa, new MAST graduate Emma Coke,’24,doesn’t remem- ber when she didn’t have a passion for the coast. Her family had a beach place in Seaside, and her high school teachers cultivated her interest in science and current events. Coke loved journalism and especially enjoyed translating complex topics into forms accessible to others. The MAST program, which offers courses like Writing for Marine Studies and Literature of the Sea, helped turn her passions into an aspiration. “I didn’t know environmental journalism was a thing,” she said. Coke graduated in June as the MAST program’s first College of Liberal Arts Outstanding Senior, recognized for “combining science and liberal arts disciplines with an ethical, outreach focus.” She secured a newspaper internship for the summer and plans to build a career as a science writer focused on marine issues. Lauren Rice, ’23, now working on a master’s in marine resource management at Oregon State, has the distinction of being the first student to officially sign up as a MAST major. “I spent countless hours waist-deep in the ocean or exploring tidepools,” she said,“which is kind of a lot when you think about how cold the ocean is on the Northwest Coast.” During Rice’s sophomore year, her MAST advisor asked her to pick a specialty within the major. She chose environmental and social justice, because she wanted to help people understand how a changing climate impacts communities that rely on marine resources. “Part of how the degree was marketed to us was that we are being trained to be boundary spanners,” she said. “I was trained to be ocean- literate but still have an understanding of social processes and things like that.” MAST students are encouraged to gather as much field experience as possible. Rice worked on the Haystack Rock Awareness Project at Cannon Beach as a tidepool interpreter and a website developer. “I was out in and around the tidepools, translating the ecological knowledge that I gained from my degree for all kinds of people, some who knew tons about the ocean and some who were seeing the ocean for the first time,” she said. As the MAST program evolves, it becomes more evident that it is especially attractive to students who, partly because of their own passions and partly because of the confidence and solid education they earn in MAST, are often interested in what’s over the horizon. Jeremy Schaffer was raised mostly in the central Willamette Valley of Oregon, but his family lived in Newport for a while when “WE ARE BEING TRAINED TO BE BOUNDARY SPANNERS. I WAS TRAINED TO BE OCEANLITERATE BUT STILL HAVE AN UNDERSTANDING OF SOCIAL PROCESSES.” ↙ As part of her field experience, Lauren Rice, ’23, worked as a tidepool interpreter with the Haystack Rock Awareness Project in Cannon Beach. ۄ Student Brett Comsa helps set up an experiment looking at the effects of diet on juvenile steelhead at the Oregon Hatchery Research Center near Eugene. continued
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