Most people want nothing to do with mosquitos, especially this time of the year. Not so for Logan Thomason, who has a summer internship with York County’s mosquito control program.
For Thomason, who is working toward a degree in health sciences, that means spending part of his 40-hour work week assisting with yard inspections and setting traps for the annoying pests.
“We then bring them back and identify them,” he said. “We have to use a dichotomous key to identify the different mosquitoes that we catch.”
That fits in well with his class work, where he learned about a dichotomous key in microbiology.
“Not all the terminology transfers over from anatomy,” he said. “But we do test for West Nile virus, so it’s important that we know that mosquitoes are vectors for different diseases, which is important for microbiology.”
Learning about the types of mosquitoes and their habitats are the most interesting parts of his internship.
Thomason grew up in Hampton, graduating from Kecoughtan High School in 2015. He then spent four years in the Coast Guard, but wasn’t interested in making it a career.
“It really wasn’t for me,” he said. “A lot of that work can be really stressful. On top of that, since I was on a boat, it was like two months (away) at a time, and I really just wanted to settle down and stay in one place.”
When he was in high school, he had taken some AP classes at the College, and thought it would be a good fit for an associate degree. He’s expected to be done within a year, but moving on to a four-year school isn’t in his immediate plans.
“First and foremost, I’d like to get a career,” he said. “If I can manage after that, then that would be nice.”
He’s not sure what field he wants to pursue, but is thinking about something related to biology. This internship works well with that, even though his main reason for applying was for work experience, any experience.
“I always tell my students that there are more opportunities than they think, but when I share them, rarely any students would respond,” said biology professor Pengfei Song. “I am very happy that Logan applied for the internship and he got it.”
Song is not surprised, though, as he said Thomason was one of his top students in his microbiology class.
“He always comes to the class prepared and asks intelligent questions,” Song said.