Undergraduate Education at FHL: The Team Behind the Transformation

by Megan Dethier, Maia Kreis and Mar Wonham

Megan Dethier, the Purpose and the People:
A core part of the FHL mission is education – of undergraduate students, graduate students and lifelong learners. As the undergraduate presence during the academic year (autumn and spring quarters) has grown over the decades, our need for staff to handle both the logistics and the core teaching responsibilities for these students has grown as well. This Tide Bite describes and celebrates the two remarkable staff members who do the bulk of the work recruiting, preparing, organizing finances for, and teaching these students, as well as providing shoulders to cry on, career advice, non-career advice, and overall making a quarter at FHL a positive and transformative experience for them. Mar Wonham is FHL’s own Teaching Faculty, and she teaches 4 courses a year at FHL – for those readers who have taught even one course here, your reaction is probably “wow”. Maia Kreis is our Academic Services Manager, a job which requires both tremendous organizational skills and an ability to balance empathy for students with FHL needs and policies. Each of them briefly tells their stories below.

Mar Wonham, FHL’s first and only Teaching Faculty:
After my first quarter at FHL, I knew I had to come back. I came as an undergraduate student in the Three Seas (then East/West) Program in the 1990s. Where else does a local “study abroad” quarter include an underwater pumpkin-carving contest, learning to use an SEM (a massive 2000 lb. device in those days), pressing truckloads of apples into cider on the dock, assisting graduate-student research divers (in wet suits) on the weekends and warming up again by the Dining Hall fireplace, picking westside blackberries to bake into pies, and hiking up Young Hill by moonlight? FHL’s scientific and social community is the reason I came back to UW for graduate school, and again over the years as a seasonal TA, instructor, and just-for-fun visitor.

I’ve now returned to FHL as a Teaching Faculty member, helping to expand the undergraduate program as it grows with the Marine Biology major. Undergraduate education is magical and messy. It’s a chance to invite students to take agency and authorship in (guided) real-world research spaces that are, if they’re at all interesting, inherently ambiguous and uncertain. For students to thrive, they need to un-learn many habits of formal education to become more comfortable taking intellectual risks, and more capable working in hands-on, collaborative, field and lab conditions. As a faculty member I get to work with curious, creative, motivated students; I get to learn cool things from and with them; and I get to collaborate with colleagues and outside partners to design cross-curricular activities like research-ethics debates, mock seacow-rewilding hearings, applied research projects, and overnight field trips. It also means that sometimes, I get to explain things like why the grass has been spray-painted neon pink on the day the FHL Advancement Board happens to visit campus (there were reasons!). But a little pink grass is worth it for the adventure of expanding a rigorous, experiential educational program.

Maia Kreis, All things Logistical Student Support:
My first experience with FHL was as an undergrad in 2012. I attended the ZooBot program that spring quarter, not really knowing what I was getting myself into. It was my first experience with research, first time doing any sort of field work, first time designing and conducting a REAL experiment that helped a REAL PhD student with their REAL marine snail research…and I absolutely loved it! For the first time, what my schooling could lead to materialized in a very tangible way. You mean, there are actually jobs where I could spend most of my time outside in nature interacting with cute, slimy invertebrates who are full of personality? Sign me up! I returned to FHL a year after graduating, as a summer research apprentice under another PhD student to investigate the interaction between seagrass and sand dollars. Again, an amazing experience. And after a rather long and circuitous-though-absolutely-fruitful path through Outdoor Education jobs, I found my way back to FHL as the Academic Services Manager.

In my position, I try to prepare students better (than I was) who are on the cusp of attending an FHL term. I advertise and recruit, create and process applications, advise on and distribute scholarships, funnel information about FHL to students and in turn, funnel information about student preferences to our dining and housing staff. I greet students when they arrive, put on “the Maia show” during Orientation Day (this is where my outdoor education experience really shines), coordinate extracurricular activities, am a great listener if there is ever a beef between students, and much more. I feel most satisfied and accomplished when coordination with a student comes full circle. This is true for students I meet at an info session on a UW campus, then quarters later I see their application come through and they are accepted; when I’ve been working with an international student for the better part of a year in order to set everything in place for them to attend and they finally arrive; or even just meeting a student in person on arrival day after corresponding with them for months to prepare for the term. After working with these students’ names and emails for so long, I start feeling like I know them before they even get here! It is so fulfilling to be able to help more students have the same magical experiences at FHL as I did when I was an undergrad.

Mar and Maia’s Work Together: One of the best parts of our jobs is working together creatively (and sometimes chaotically) to help shape the academic and co-curricular undergraduate environment. FHL’s immersive classes present more demands than a conventional lecture-based format, for a host of reasons. Much of the learning is scheduled around the tides, because lunar gravity operates 24/7. This variable timetable means students need to adjust to working some early mornings, late nights, and weekends. Much of the learning happens outdoors, moving around, carrying equipment, and peering into pools or balancing on boats. This embodied-learning takes musculoskeletal effort and metabolic regulation in sunny, rainy, windy, cold, hot, and wet conditions (sometimes all in the same day). Much of the learning requires collaborative teamwork. When success depends on inter-reliance, students need to be physically and mentally present and attentive to the environment, to the creatures, and to each other throughout the day. Much of the learning is experiential, filled with real-life opportunities for the normal failures of science: weather and creatures and equipment all have their own opinions and behaviors. This means students need to cultivate curiosity and humility and resilience to be able to roll with it all. The campus is cozy: everyone studies, lives, eats and socializes together. This means students need to navigate the ups and downs of interpersonal interactions and invest in co-creating a constructive community.

All of these demands certainly make student life here more challenging! But, as Labbies know well, they can also amplify student learning and forge life-long networks of colleagues and friends. In our roles at FHL, we are here not to remove these demands, but to help students expand their capacity to navigate and embrace them. Seeing students return for more after taking one set of courses is one of the great joys of the job.

Megan sums it up: Mar and Maia have written mostly about their work with undergraduates, but of course FHL is still also a mecca for graduate students, especially in the summer. Maia works with every one of those students too, enabling them to get to FHL and have a great experience. Mar has taught summer courses and workshops on a number of occasions (e.g. Intertidal Tidings 2025 p.7). Thus, their teamwork continues year-round. As this essay goes to press, they can often be seen with their heads together planning for spring course scheduling, last-minute applications, updating fieldtrip forms, making plans for orientation activities to build more robust student cohorts, and the thousand other details that go into making our education program remarkable. We are so lucky to have these two!

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