Stella Gaydek (BS ’26) says she chose to major in the University of Michigan’s Program in the Environment (PitE) for its interdisciplinary nature and the ability to customize her degree, adding that the flexibility to engage in a study abroad experience, which U-M has consistently ranked as the nation’s top public university for, was also important to her.

“I wanted to get out in the field and study the ocean hands-on,” she says.

The fall semester of her sophomore year was spent in Turks and Caicos through a Center for Global and Intercultural Studies-sponsored study abroad program. She described how PitE made it easy to study abroad and transfer her credits to her U-M transcript. 

Gaydek is a senior in PitE—a jointly managed program between the School for Environment and Sustainability (SEAS) and the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts (LSA)—specializing in coastal ecology and conservation. She is also working on two minors, Sustainability in PitE and Oceanography through LSA's Earth and Environmental Science program.

In addition to her studies, she says she wanted to be part of an extracurricular activity specific to her major, and is now the founding vice president of the Michigan Aquaponics club. She explains how the club is “building an aquaponics system on an off-campus farm in Ypsilanti,” with a goal to educate on and promote aquaponics systems. Gaydek is also in the Coastal Ecology and Conservation Lab, led by LSA Associate Professor Jacob Allgeier. She says that, together, these experiences keep her busy and engaged. 

She adds that she has taken advantage of professional opportunities to enhance her academic ones. This past summer, she interned with Stanford University’s Sustainability Undergraduate Research in Geoscience and Engineering Program, working alongside a graduate student mentor doing kelp forest dynamics research. 

“I spent my summer comparing different survey methods using coding software and then using those comparisons to see how the forest has been evolving and changing over time, and potentially recovering.”

Gaydek says that connecting with other professionals plays an important role in this field and that her summer internship gave her opportunities to connect. 

“I got a lot of networking opportunities, met a lot of really cool people in my field, and got to interact with people who have the same unique interests as me,” says Gaydek. “My experiences through PitE definitely helped me get that opportunity, because I was able to talk about experiences I had, such as the clubs I’m in, the classes that I’ve taken, and the study abroad. The interdisciplinary aspect is a really nice thing to be able to mention in any interview.”

For her post-sophomore-year summer, Gaydek spent her time in the Allgeier lab working on an invertebrate project, which involved counting, classifying, and determining biomass for each invertebrate group taken from the reefs in the Bahamas as part of the larger project to understand the impact of artificial reefs on a coastal ecosystem. She has continued her research with this lab and is doing her senior thesis in conjunction with her work.

Gaydek knows she wants to pursue a PhD in her future. Looking ahead to post-graduation, she wants to gain more hands-on experience in the field, such as being a lab technician. 

“I want to get myself more comfortable in the field, in the research environment in general, before I go into my PhD,” she says. She is still exploring her PhD area of interest, but knows it will be marine ecology-based.

Her advice to new and prospective PitE students is to be open to new classes and experiences that you think you might not normally enjoy, and to apply for research positions. 

“I love PitE, and I’m so glad I chose it.”