![]() A true Dr. Dolitte in spirit, Mia has a heart filled with love for all-things-animal in addition to her reptile roots at the PWM and her passion for pinnipeds, Mia is a feline fanatic captivated by big cats and has a deep love for horses and horseback-riding.Īs a student-run natural history museum, it's no surprise that the PWM has had a number of excellent students develop and emerge from its ranks over its 4-decades of existence. Her dedication to saving elephant seals as a teenage volunteer at the Marine Mammal Center has continued on into her adulthood currently, she spends her weekends performing cutting-edge research on the bratwurst-like pinnipeds as a member of Cal Poly's "Team Ellie" Northern elephant seal research lab. Here's the thing, though: Mia successfully handled ALL of it, AND got straight-As to boot!Ĭurrently, Mia is in her 4th year at Cal Poly majoring in Animal Science and is looking to pursue a career in exotic animal husbandry and wild animal education. Add to this, she was ALSO a teen volunteer at the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito for 6 hours every Monday night and you can imagine the mountain of chores, tasks, and responsibilities this young lady was juggling her senior year. She did this as a full-time student, often times finishing her husbandry work in the middle of the night, exhausted, and with homework still on the docket when she got home. She fought through mite outbreaks, inconsistent food delivery times, intermittent energy-grid blackouts and wildfire-shut-downs, every sort of husbandry obstacle you can imagine, all to care for our zoo. Armed with a set of keys and a code, Mia spent HUNDREDS of HOURS after-school and on the weekends feeding, cleaning, and treating the over 100 creatures in our collection. That's where Mia stepped in: at 17-years of age, she became the first (and only) current PWM student to be hired on as our full-time Animal Care Technician, responsible for the ultimate health and stability of our small animal zoo. The process of finding, interviewing, and hiring a qualified Animal Care Tech -then getting said Tech up-to-steam with our particular protocols and procedures- is a process that usually takes months and we didn't have that time. A full-time Animal Care Tech was needed on alternate days and the weekend (including all holidays) to ensure the survival of our collection. ![]() The previous Care Tech had vacated the position shortly after the start of the 2017-18 academic year and it put our zoo and program in a dire predicament: class enrollment that year was low and it made daily husbandry by our students an impossibility. Mia White, PHS c/o 2018, blossomed under such circumstances when, in her senior year at PHS, she was asked to become the full-time Animal Care Technician at the PWM. The conditional statement that summed up the original pedagogical philosophy at the PWM was "if you give a high school student as much responsibility and freedom as possible, they will rise to the challenge and succeed." Of course, in retrospect, most educators would agree: students need a lot more structure and guidance to fully thrive, but it is true, every once in a while, a kid put in an impossible situation can emerge a hero.
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