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Quarantine Blog: Monk parakeets break the internet

Posted on Wednesday, April 15, 2020 by for Quarantine Blog.

I work in Dr. Grasso's lab at Brooklyn College studying monk parakeets. Once a week I would go on parrot patrol where I would take the bus from Brooklyn College to the colony on Avenue O near 65th Street where I would record and photograph the nests and parrot activity. Afterwards I would head back to the lab and put all the data on the computer. On other days we would have long meetings that would go on for around 2 hours where we all discussed our research projects. Overall the time that I spent in the lab would be equivalent to one school day.

However, when all schools were closed and quarantine was enacted we had to make some quick changes. Dropbox has always been an important part of the lab where we would upload our slides, but now we can't live without it. Dropbox is now where we upload slides, score videos, and save and share our work with Dr. Grasso. Two times a week we have meetings with Dr. Grasso on Zoom which are longer than when we were in Brooklyn College. As a result of quick thinking everyone is still able to continue conducting their experiments.

Meghan Stern (Class of 2020)