A little known part of PSU is the awesome herbarium on campus (hey, another natural history collection hidden away in a basement...). I enjoyed working at thePenn State Herbarium (PAC) as a volunteer, mounting voucher specimens for the Arboretum Barcoding Project. The goal of the project is to collect the DNA/RNA of all the species present at the Arboretum to have as a genomic resource.
I then worked as a digital imaging intern, digitizing thousands of herbarium specimens from the collection for the Mid-Atlantic Megalopolis Project, which aims to analyze the effects of urbanization on plant life in the urban corridor from New York City to Washington, D.C. I have also made my own plant collections of Southern Hemisphere conifers for my research that are now a part of the collections at PAC.