Paula Charbonneau

I am a local to NOAA’s Silver Spring location, living all my 18 years of life at my home in Rockville, Maryland. This year I will be a senior at Stone Ridge School of the Sacred Heart, and ironically our proud mascot is the “Gator.”  So some would say I was fated to have some part in the Alligator Project, but the truth is a little bit less glamorous.  I walked into Stone Ridge’s internship office in May, hoping to find some sort of job for the summer and was promptly informed that most people walked in with the same idea 5 months earlier in January, and it might be tough to get a good internship at that time.  In spite of my tardiness, and luckily for me, I was given the contact of Michiko Martin with the National Marine Sanctuaries Program, an internship opportunity based on my interest of applied science, particularly ecology.  For the month I worked there during July 2004 I was given the challenge of finding information regarding the storm that sank the USS Alligator that April of 1863.  The importance of the Alligator for the Sanctuaries Program could be detected by the sheer number of posters displaying the mysterious submarine around the office, however, after speaking to university libraries all up and down the east coast and getting my hands dusty searching through the National Archives’ collection of ships’ logs, the importance of the project to history also became evident.  An underlying part of the mission of the Alligator Project was to inspire a few budding scientists and historians along the way, and this summer, it has inspired a little bit of both in me.