Hannah Park
Hannah Park began volunteering in the MVZ Prep Lab, which she heard of through the student Pre-Vet Club on campus, when she was a freshman in the spring of 2007. She continued her involvement in the MVZ Prep Lab in the fall of 2007 and is enrolled in the MVZ Prep Lab course this spring 2008. She is well seasoned in dissecting and preparing mammal skeletons for the collections. From her experience in the spring of 2007, she was then hired as a Museum Lab Assistant in the fall of 2007 to help with the complicated process of passing skeletons through the dermestid beetle colony and then individually labeling all the bones with their catalog number afterwards (this includes tiny bones from shrews and hummingbirds)! She continues with this job in the spring 2008 and plans on taking the Natural History of the Vertebrates class in her junior year.
“The Museum of Vertebrate Zoology is a community of wonderful staff, teachers, colleagues, and members all passionate about building an institution grounded on academia and excellence. Though many of these people are busy organizing this place for advancing science, I never found any person unwilling to help me with my first two semesters of working and volunteering here. The working environment is very friendly and there is never a moment I was bored. Not only was I earning money through work-study but my supervisors encouraged intellectual thinking. I learned the basic anatomy of mammals and birds and learned the importance of being detail-orientated and all-together focused. There is so much thought and detail involved at this museum, in whatever is produced or created, and it made me appreciate all the hard work necessary to have what we have today. I am very honored to continue working at the MVZ!”