Bowdoin Scientific Station on Kent Island Summer Research Information

Spend Your Summer Doing Research or Art
in one of the World’s Most Beautiful Places

Patricia Jones, Director Ian Kyle, Assistant Director

Now: Develop project topic; touch base with the Kent Island Director, Professor Patricia Jones, (and with off-island mentor if applicable)

Before Feb 15:  Email a brief ‘intent to submit’ to the Director at [email protected]
Feb 28 by noon:  Email your full application as a PDF to the Director
Mar 15:  Decisions will be conveyed to students via email

How to Choose a Science Project

Approach 1: Choose from the list below and develop the idea further in discussions with the Director. This is the most common approach.

Approach 2: Work with a Bowdoin professor (or with the Director) to develop your own idea that’s not on this list. Recognize that this approach takes additional initiative on your part, but we encourage and support you.

How to Choose an Art or Writing Project

Consult with a Bowdoin professor to develop a focus for your work and a possible way for her/him to provide support and feedback during the summer. Do some background research to understand the Kent Island environment and how it can inform/inspire your proposed work.

Kent Island Cook

We need a cook to prepare dinner for the group 6 days a week. This is a fellowship position that involves part-time work as a scientist or artist/writer.  If you’re potentially interested, contact us right away for details.

Contact Info

Director:  Professor Patricia Jones
Email:  [email protected]

Assistant Director: Ian Kyle
Email:  [email protected]

Potential Science Project Ideas (ask us for details)

– Pollinator communities on wild blueberries
– Floral constancy in different pollinator groups
– Mate-searching behavior by Leach’s storm-petrels
– Storm-petrel recognition of predator vocalizations
– Pathogens of storm-petrels in relation to MHC
– Coordination of egg incubation in storm-petrels
– Host plant specificity of spittlebugs
– Inbreeding depression in irises
– Ontogeny of vocalizations in yellow warblers
– Ecological responses to the eradication of snowshoe hares
– Factors affecting reforestation success in coastal field habitats
– Abiotic stressors of low tide in the Basin
– Intertidal community: effects of removing rockweed and periwinkles
– Spider web characteristics and capture success
– Eider ducks: nest success and/or adult relative abundance and sex ratio over the summer

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.”
– Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods

“You need three things to become a successful novelist: talent, luck and discipline. Discipline is the one element of those three things that you can control, and so that is the one that you have to focus on controlling, and you just have to hope and trust in the other two.”
– Michael Chabon