My name is Josh Sanchez. I live in Dorchester, Boston, and I attend Boston Latin Academy.

 
Josh in the Aquarium’s Wet Lab with one of our horseshoe crabs!

I am currently a teen intern in the Dive department at the New England Aquarium. I help with food prep, cleaning, setting up dive equipment and feeding various surface animals, including Myrtle our green sea turtle that resides in the Giant Ocean Tank!

 
Daily menu for the animals of our Giant Ocean Tank. With four feeding dives a day, there is a lot of food prep and cleaning up to do!

I and 10 other teens are involved in a program called Sea TURTLE. (Learn a little more about this program in this post from the inaugural Sea TURTLE program.)  Our goal is to become dive certified, learn marine biology, and go on an expedition to the Bahamas! This program is a dream opportunity that I am very grateful to take part in and very excited to experience.

It wasn't easy to get this once in a lifetime opportunity and the stakes were high. There was a very long application process that included having to write several essays, get letters of recommendations, fill out various papers, get parental consent and even turn in financial forms for scholarship eligibility. Along with that there were group and individual interviews.



The group interview was very different from anything that I have ever experienced. During the interview we did various group like activities to show if we are able to work as a group and express our confidence.

For the individual interviews we were required to bring an item that was special to us. I brought my Marlins baseball cap and a jar from Puerto Rico. The hat is very important to me because it was the cap I wore for my first baseball game. The jar was from my first trip to the country where I am from. During this interview, I was very nervous. I actually started to sweat!

The day of the decisions, I kept refreshing my email waiting for confirmation. Finally at the end of my school day, there was the email from Jenna! My heart almost stopped! Finally I got my nerves together and I opened it to read this: "Congratulations! You have been accepted into the New England Aquarium’s Sea TURTLE Program!"

I jumped up and the down in the middle of the hallway at school and started yelling, "I'm going to the Bahamas!"

So this is a little about who I am how I came to be a Sea TURTLE!

-Josh