With her legs fidgeting and her hands taking up part-time jobs as silent film actors, you realize Mia isn’t someone meant to sit still. Although we’re in a stuffy room with unorganizable desks, entrapped by white walls and grey carpet that has seen better days, Mia is seeing the ocean. She describes her adventures at sea with every inch of her body, twirling fake rope around her arm as if she’s tying an anchor hitch, her feet firmly planting themselves as her shoulders sway with the boat’s movements, and her eyes scanning furiously to spot something out of the ordinary. This room doesn’t have a hint of blue in it, but there didn’t need to be for Mia to see what she wanted.

“Shark tagging on a boat… I feel like I know what I’m doing and I don’t feel like I know what I’m doing in anything else.”

Mia Gomez, a junior at Wilkes Honors College, is an aspiring Marine Biologist, focusing her studies and efforts in Marine and Environmental conservation. She never quite knew how much she loved the sea, stating she wasn’t even sure of her ocean “origin story,” while proceeding to speak about it.

When in middle school, Mia’s 6^th grade teacher – Mr. Trachtenberg, a name as unforgettable as his impact on Mia – wanted to set up a field trip locally to the Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science (RSMAES), University of Miami (UM) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) campuses. When he offered the idea up to the class, no one was interested… except for one. “Nobody wanted to go,” Mia says still perplexed to this day — “What is wrong with you [all], why?”

Being alone in her interest, Mr. Trachtenberg signed up Mia to go on the field trip with her mom, a trustworthy chaperone as he couldn’t just leave his class of uninterested students alone. Upon touring these facilities, Mia was in awe. “It was crazy, I had never seen all these science devices and that was the first year NOAA came out with the TED (Turtle Exclusion Device)” further explaining this contraption as a gate at the end of a trawling net that sea turtles can swim out of without disrupting the rest of the trawling.

Fast forward a few months and Mia finds herself participating in a Young Women in Marine Science Day at UM where she is able to do real-life marine labs, her favorite being a Toadfish Blood Lab. She then finds herself in a summer Research in Ecology program at UM RSMAES, where her marine origin story continued to evolve. Not even a 7^th grader yet, Mia found herself taking classes, conducting research, crafting a scientific paper and even presenting research at a program-ending symposium. “It was kind of a college experience, but I was in middle school,” Mia snickered, remembering how worthwhile the experience was at such a young age.

These three programs led Mia to find a Maritime program at MAST Academy in Key Biscayne where she found her first love, shark tagging. “So basically in 9^th grade I went shark tagging for the first time and,” Mia lets out a high-pitched squeal “I just couldn’t believe it, crazy! I went shark tagging and was on every trip from that point on.” But Mia still doesn’t believe any of this was truly an origin story, just things that randomly happened to her.

As she planned for college, she knew it had to be somewhere with a Marine Science program. She wanted to stay in Florida and found her new home at the Honors College. She enjoyed the quaintness of the Jupiter campus, since getting lost on a large college campus was a real concern, even fear, for her. But she also recalled driving 10 mins east on Donald Ross Road where she saw the beach in the horizon. “The minute I saw the water, I had to pull over. This is crazy, and I said ‘oh gosh I have to come here now’ because it was so gorg[eous]….” Mia stopped midsentence, eyes closed, scrunching up her entire being like a mini coiled spring ready to be rocketed in the air, “This right here, I love it!” she continued after a number of joyful screeches and squeals.

Mia, entering her 3^rd year at the Wilkes Honors College, has already accomplished more than most, even those at the largest universities in the world. She is out at sea regularly, waking up at 4 am to drive an hour north to FAU’s Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute (HBOI) in order to be on a boat and start shark tagging by 6 am. She’s constantly looking for opportunities to better her understanding of Marine Biology and opportunities on how to better the public’s understanding in the subject. Mia eventually wants work in oceanic policymaking in some capacity. “One thing I’ve done since middle school is, whenever I’m presenting something science-y that people may not understand, I send it to my grandma… I will ask her ‘What are the main ideas you’re getting from this’ and if it’s what I wanted, then I know I’ve done it well,” Mia says in all seriousness.

With all this extra effort, attention to detail and the wherewithal to plan for a future in Marine Biology, Mia decided to apply for the NOAA Hollings Scholarship. This is an undergraduate scholarship that provides scholars with “hands-on, practical experience in NOAA-related science, research, technology, policy, management, and education activities.” Being one of the most prestigious Marine Science scholarships out there, it takes quite impressive individuals to receive this scholarship; Mia is one of those individuals. In May 2023, she was awarded the scholarship which includes a hefty money prize for current educational endeavors and an internship opportunity to spend an entire summer on any NOAA base.

Although a big scholarship winner, Mia is not resting on her laurels, nor would you expect her to if you met her. She is an intelligent, hard-working individual with enough foresight and self-awareness for two people. As such, she already booked an entire year of oceanic educational travel and research. As this is published, she is completing a 6-month exchange program at the University of Technology Sydney in Australia. After that, she immediately travels back to the States to start the Honors College and Harbor Branch Semester At The Sea, an undergraduate one-semester affair where students work at FAU’s Harbor Branch and the Department of Biological Science of FAU in Fort Pierce, Florida.

Because she’ll be so busy, the only problem Mia will have over the next year is not going to any concerts, a hobby that has turned into an obsession for her at this point. “I love concerts,” Mia said with conviction “I just saw Taylor Swift; it was my 33^rd concert.” That is not a small feat, especially for someone so young, but it’s almost a way of life when you grow up in Miami and have a love for music. It’s a shame Australia’s less-than-desirable tour schedules for artists will slow her total down for the year, we were sure she’d make it to 50 concerts by the time she was back in Florida.

As Mia continues on her path in becoming the world’s best shark tagger, we’ll know where to find her most days: on a fishing boat for 12-hour days trawling away. She’s off to a good start and we’re excited to see what wonderful research and policies Mia will help write that her grandma’s eyes will be the first to see.