Josh's First Week!

My first week as a High School Intern at the South Carolina Aquarium was certainly a thrilling and interesting one! It is hard to believe that I actually got the opportunity to work here, and starting out I learned a lot of lessons from everyone interacted with. From Drew and Kate to my fellow interns, other co-workers and even guests at the Aquarium, I build a lot of chemistry and learned a lot of techniques to help myself in future weeks. My favorite part of the internship so far is definitely handling alligators and snakes. Surprisingly, they are very calm and docile animals most of the time and relatively easy to handle. I was amazed that I was able to handle and carry them so effortlessly on the very first day. Of course, there will always be some mistakes and I certainly had my own share of scares. One time, when I was trying to switch handling duties of one gator to Jen, I pointed the gator’s head right at a little boy held by his father. This definitely scared both Jen and I, but the boy was calm as could be and even lightly petted its head, another bad no-no. Another time when I was handling a gator by myself and trying to pass out hand sanitizer and a little girl came up and squeezed the gator’s tail when I was not looking. He had already been a little agitated earlier, so of course this got him really riled up. I’ll always make sure to keep an eye on those gators!

-Josh