Located on the shores of Lake Itasca — the headwaters of the Mississippi River — Itasca Biological Station and Laboratories (IBSL) offers University of Minnesota students and faculty a living laboratory. Instead of studying ecology strictly through lectures and textbooks, students learn directly in the field.  

“Say you’re studying fisheries in a classroom,” says Emily Schilling, PhD, associate director of IBSL. “When you come here, you’re actually working with the fish in their natural environment. It’s a very different way of learning.”

At the heart of IBSL’s mission is an ongoing water monitoring program that tracks metrics like temperature, clarity, dissolved oxygen levels and ice cover duration on the lakes in Itasca State Park. With data sets going back to the 1930s, this long-term research provides vital baseline data for understanding how aquatic ecosystems function and change over time — information that helps scientists protect water quality down the Mississippi and across the state.

“It’s important that we understand what’s happening in these more pristine systems like Itasca, to see how our waters should be functioning naturally,” says Schilling.

To keep the water monitoring project going, IBSL relies on two donor-funded summer interns. Living and working at the station, the interns are also involved with additional field research and public outreach, including We Are Water, a program designed to engage people in conversations about the vital role of water in Minnesota. The interns gain hands-on experience while collaborating with faculty and visiting researchers — a mentorship dynamic rarely possible in a traditional lecture hall.

For Schilling, the internship program represents a cycle of impact made possible by generous alumni.

“The immersive experiences students have at a biological station can be very impactful and formative,” she says. “Now these folks are giving back to the station and wanting to pay it forward so they can enable these experiences for the next generation of students.”

Meet this summer’s interns:

Layne Anderson

Hometown: Duluth, Minn. 
Major: Fisheries, wildlife and conservation biology

On sharing knowledge with Itasca State Park visitors: 
“It’s interesting to see the wide range of people who come to enjoy the state park. And I think it’s very important for us at the biological station to make our presence known and educate the public about what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. That kind of transparency is really important in shaping public opinion about what the University is doing out here.”

On learning from experts at IBSL: 
“The station hosted a speaker from the Nature Conservancy who works on prescribed burns. A lot of our systems up here in northern Minnesota are pine heavy, and those pines and spruces are fire dependent. It was really cool to learn about fire’s relevancy in northern Minnesota’s ecology.”

Career aspirations: 
“This is my first internship. I was previously at a community college, and they didn’t really tell me about summer internships. It wasn’t until I got to the University of Minnesota that the importance of an experience like this was made apparent to me. Now that I’m here at the station, making connections and networking — it’s like the launching pad for what I’m going to be able to do in my future career. It’s been a total game changer.”

Cassidy Berg

Hometown: St. Paul, Minn. 
Major: Forestry and natural resource management

Why she applied for the IBSL internship: 
“There aren’t a lot of jobs at field stations [for undergraduates] where you get to live there on a long-term basis, and they’re in very high demand. I thought this might be one of the only times in my life when I would get the opportunity to live and work at a field station. I thought that, no matter what, this would be really special and help me learn a lot.”

On doing public outreach as an intern: 
“What I’ve discovered is that people really do want to learn and talk, especially when you start talking to Minnesotans about water. Everybody cares about protecting the water we have, and they’re really interested in learning about the research that we do on the lakes here. But I think what’s even more important when you’re doing outreach is to be able to step back and listen and meet them where they’re at — to pinpoint what is actually sparking their interest.”  

On the right path: 
“Sometimes it’s easy to lose sight of the end goal when you’re in college and just focus on passing classes. Working with this cohort of people [at IBSL] who are interested in the same things has confirmed this is the path I want to take. I would love to spend eight hours a day tromping through the forest. This is where things came into focus for me.”

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