Working with Spinner Dolphins in Oahu

“Nothing compares to being on the bow of the boat with 10 dolphins just swimming. They love to jump out of the water and spin around. It's incredible!”

Ava Sergio spent last semester abroad, completing her work term in Hawaiʻi. She took some time to talk with us about working with dolphins, personal development, and finding an international work term. 

“Being at home for so long through the pandemic, I was eager to go somewhere different and try something new,” Ava said, “I started looking at international opportunities on the Internet, Googling what I could find. I ended up coming across the Hawaiʻi Institute of Marine Biology."

Ava talked about the work she completed. “I've been helping a visiting researcher named Claire Lacey on her project, focusing on spinner dolphins around Oahu. Specifically, Claire's been trying to determine their population size around the main Hawaiian Islands. We've been doing most of our field work around the Oahu coastline. We go out on the water and photograph their dorsal fins so we’re able to identify them later and get population estimates.” 

Ava spoke about her personal development. “I'm really proud of a side project that my boss and I have started working on, which is getting me lot more familiar with using R and GIS,” she said, “I become more familiar with them through my work term, and we've started a project looking at swell data of locations around the island where spinner dolphins are known to reside and looking at how different swells impact their presence,” Ava said, “I'm proud of myself for being able to tackle those things because they were originally quite scary to me as I'm not a big technology person.”

We asked Ava what advice she has for students interested in completing international work terms. “If you're interested in doing it, or if you're considering it, I say go for it. It's so worth it,” she said, “Be persistent with your search for opportunities. I was looking for weeks and months--not heavily, but continually going online to see if there was anything new and reaching out to people--sometimes who I didn’t hear back from. Continue to search and reach out because eventually you'll find something.”