Listen to Daria (2020) talk about her internship working at the Cincinnati Zoo this past summer.

Transcript: Stephanie: Hi, you're listening to Gear Up, the Duke Career Center student produced podcast showcasing real student summer internship experiences. My name's Stephanie Mayle and today, we're talking to Daria, who worked at the Cincinnati Zoo this summer.

Daria: My name's Daria Patterson-Smith. I'm a senior at Duke and I'm majoring in Evolution Anthropology.

Stephanie: And what did you do this past summer?

Daria: This past summer, I interned at the Cincinnati Zoo in their Primate Department. So I was just a general animal husbandry intern there.

Stephanie: Now, how do you find out about that position?

Daria: So this is it wasn't like I went through any avenue or anything. I just looked up best zoos in America and the Cincinnati zoo came up as the greenest zoo in the country. And I thought that was really cool because a lot of zoos, I've never heard a zoo really trying to be green. They aligned well with my values and whatnot. So I applied there. And it ended up being that some people, the Lemurs Center knew the Primate Director there, because pretty much all the lemurs in the zoos in America come from the Lemur Center. So I volunteer at the Lemur Center. So that is just good connections all around.

Stephanie: Yeah. So was that kind of your primary experience? You know, doing that kind of work was really the lemur center.

Daria: Yeah, I volunteered at the Lemur Center doing general lemur husbandry. And then I also used to volunteer at the Animal Protection Society of Durham. Also not really doing cleaning there more so doing like dog walks and trying to train them before they go into their homes. So the people, they'll be more adoptable if they're more trained. So yeah, I sort of was doing all these things because I was on the fence about becoming a vet and it was pre-vet. So I figured it all helped me decide.

Stephanie: And what were you doing day to day at the zoo?

Daria: Yeah. So my day started every day, at seven.

Stephanie: That's early.

Daria: Yeah. But pretty much I would get there and wait for the head keeper to come down because they get there probably five in the morning. So then they would come down and sort of give me the task for the day. But day-to-day it was just cleaning all the big behind the scenes enclosures for the animals, cleaning up all the old straw that we would put out because they make their little beds out of the cleaning up of the poop in the bed. And then setting those up so that when they come inside, there's food and like new straw and vegetables and greens. Yeah. It all depended on the animal. So for the tiny marmosets, they sitzmark a lot. And if you wash their sitzmark every day, it will stress them out and they'll just lose all their hair. So it's like things like that. It's like take into consideration every day for each animal.

Stephanie [00:03:08 ] So did you like it, doing that kind of work?

Daria: I sort of went into the internship wanting it to be a decider. Do I want to be a vet or not? And ideally, I would want to be a zoo vet. And so I sort of used it in that way. And so I liked being around a lot of the animals a lot. But it sort of became a little monotonous because there's a 14 week internship. I didn't love that part about it, but I did love being around the animals. And the vets are in their own department. They're not necessarily around us all the time. So I actually got to shadow them a couple of times, which was really cool. Unfortunately, we had to put down a little penguin who had bumble foot who couldn't walk anymore. And then he liked walked me through a necropsy of the penguin, which is cool and something like I'll probably never, ever see again. And so I got to shadow at the vet hospital that the zoo partners with four big surgeries, which was awesome. So I liked it in those regards, but it made me realize the type of job that I need needs