How do you get a job working on new strains of plants? That sounds cool.
its not directly working in the lab, but a really low-rung and labor intensive job in the test fields. like usually in a normal corn field, the farmer has plants, they do detassling in late june/early july, and the bugs pollinate it for the entire month of july using the non-detassled plants onto the female parts of the detassled plants and bam, you have corn.
in my job, though, the actual research lab is full of corn breeders and scientists in the middle of a massive corn field that has hundreds of different strains of corn growing in it. they can’t just detassle and let the bugs and breeze pollinate the females-- each plant strain must be attended to in order to yield seed the researchers and breeders can use. theres way too much for them to do themselves, so the hire about 100 teenagers to do the dirty work. ill cover the specifics of corn pollination and why we detassle in another post because ive been getting questions about it (mostly from the “corn bukkake” shitpost) but basically my job is:
-check each plant for new shoots. cover the upper shoot with a special bag.
-check each plant for blooming tassles. cover the tassle in a special bag.
-without allowing any contact from the outside air (which is riddled with pollen that 200% CANNOT be allowed to touch the blooming females; we have to make sure to ONLY pollinate the females with the specific males to get the right seed) flip the shoot bag off and cover it with the tassle bag from pollinator corn, pollinating the plant
-miscellaneous stuff. like today we did tagging, where we put plastic tags covered in numbers and barcodes on very specific plants in the field.
as for how i got the job, a rep from the research center came to my Project Lead The Way college class and talked about her job with breeding. later that year, our final project was to present a sustainable solution. I kept going with my thermogenesis/AOX research that I’d been working on with a partner, just applying it to a possible system on your roof that would provide electricity. this was a presentation in front of a set of judges; our teacher had called someone from each of the fields to which we were presenting, and he’d called back this researcher to watch ours. our presentation was 40 minutes long, 20 for me and 20 for my partner. I presented on manipulating the AOX pathway to allow more electron flow, potentially engineering a thermogenic plant out of a specific moss i had been looking at for that purpose, and my partner (whos a friend of mine going into mechanical engineering) presented on her idea of how to apply a possibly heat-producing moss in a system that an ordinary person could use to produce electricity in their own home.
afterwards, i approached her, and she was pretty impressed and gave me her card!!! i emailed the research center and they said that they didn’t have any positions for internships, but did have open slots on their pollination crews if i wanted to get to know the plants. and here i am!
side note: the Project Lead The Way classes are AWESOME (or at least the one I took, Environmental Sustainability, was). they’re STEM focused college-level classes that focus more on engineering, but also focus a ton on careers in engineering and science, a lot blue collar things you can go into with less than a four-year degree if you want to. for example we went on a ton of field trips and actually got to like????? see the stuff we were talking about???? like we went to a water treatment plant, and got to see the windmill engineering lab at a nearby community college (there are actually a TON of jobs and a LOT of good money in windmill maintenance right now btw. it takes a 2 year community college course and the industry needs people so badly they hire a lot of graduates into 50,000 dollar salaries before they even graduate). we also went to a yeast factory and a cereal plant and idk i found it all. SUPER cool. and then at the end, we took a giant test over the course, and I scored high enough to get legit college credit from a university in Iowa (not AP credit. like. actual credit as in i basically started college), which transferred to my university and 200% counts. And if I end up going to a sustainability minor (which I might bc that class was one of my favorite classes ive ever taken in terms of subject matter) that credit means transfers so I’ve already taken the beginning level 3 credit course for that minor. this has been a shameless plug for Project Lead The Way