Animal scientist finds pearl of a career
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Photo by Tom Campbell
Kim Hamilton's work dress code is shorts and T-shirts, because she's
usually waist deep in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. |
"She seemed like a perfect candidate," Swann says. "She
was a good student, she had some background in aquaculture during her
semester at Zamorano, and she had a familiarity with Auburn's facility
because she had seen it on her spring trip two years earlier."
But after the second vet school rejection, Hamilton wasn't sold on
the idea of becoming a student again.
"I really didn't know much about grad school," Hamilton admits.
"But I became a little more interested once I found out I would
be paid as a graduate research assistant."
And the more she thought about it, the better it sounded. She was familiar
with Auburn's aquaculture facilities from that Animal Sciences 393 class
trip she took in 1998.
"That was really the first time I had ever heard of the word aquaculture.
It really sparked my interest," Hamilton says.
And there was that summer raising tilapia at Zamorano in Honduras.
She loved being outdoors. Oyster research, she guessed, probably wouldn't
require a dress code. Suddenly, grad school was looking like a pretty
good salve for the injuries the vet school rejection had inflicted.
Hamilton was so anxious to get started in this new career direction
that she took three weeks of classes at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab before
officially being accepted into the graduate program.
She earned her MS from Auburn's Department of Fisheries and Allied
Aquacultures in 2002, specializing in oyster research.
Most of her research was done on Dauphin Island, a nugget of paradise
three miles off the U.S. mainland in Mobile Bay.
The island is a tiny sliver of sand that separates Mobile Bay from
the Gulf of Mexico.
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