The Brief History of a Box
Hello fellow Scholars,
I’ve been meaning to post for sometime now from Moss Landing, CA, home to Phil’s Fish Market, more sea lions than people, and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), where I am serving out the 10 weeks of my internship in generally good conduct. For those who don’t know me, my name is Jonathan Karp and I’m an Earth and Ocean Sciences major finishing his last semester at Duke this fall. For those who were drawn in by the title, don’t worry, you’re in the right place: my task this summer was to build a plastic box.
Morphologically similar to, but wholly unrelated to the common box, I was recruited to design an incubator for water vessels that will be housed on the open deck of a research vessel in the North Pacific Ocean. The box needed to be sealed from the inside to prevent leaks when pumped full of seawater. It needed to be strong enough to deal with the environmental stresses of the open deck. It also needed to look impressive. (For those interested, we ended up with a 4′ x 2.5′ x 1.7′ box made of clear polycarbonate with PVC corner angles for support and blue 2069 acrylic sheeting for light filtration. Leaks be damned, the box has more holes than a miniature golf complex.)
This was my first venture into engineering, scholastically or professionally, and I had no idea that I was doing this heading into the summer. Six weeks later, I look back on an exciting project, a breath of fresh air that has shaken me out of the funk of ordinary classwork and summer jobs. Moral of the story: do technical work in a field in which you’ve had no prior training.
Aside from that, life in California is great. I wake up in the morning, eat breakfast, and get excited when I remember that I’m getting paid by MBARI to be here. Lately I’ve been rediscovering some of my favorite Bob Dylan songs. I’m learning SCUBA. What more could a person ask for?
I hope to post again at least once before we all head to Durham, but feel free to contact me (jonathan.karp@duke.edu) if you are interested in boxes, doing research, cooking, or you know a good pizza place in the Monterey area. Hope you are all enjoying the summer, and I wish everyone the best until next time.
-Jonathan K.
