We encountered plenty of problems! 

My parents managed to take everything in stride, but I'll gladly admit that I spent a substantial amount of time terrified of inadvertently killing or breaking something.

Large Oyster Seed

Prior to the summer of 2012, I had a little bit of experience working as a Oyster Larvae Technician at Coast Seafoods. However, as I quickly found out, there is a world of difference between working within the confines of a large, established, company with a host of experienced coworkers and working alone at a fledgling business--at your parent's expense.

Needless to say, there were some terrible moments. Equipment broke, electrical systems short-circuited, wires came loose, massive PVC pipe contraptions of my own design came flying apart (admittedly, I always should have seen that coming), drains leaked, screens plugged, temperatures inside the greenhouse got dangerously high, supersaturation of oxygen in the water caused oyster seed to float to the top of the screens (and potentially caused embolisms), and, tragically, some days we would even run out of peanut butter crackers in the office.

It all got figured out eventually.

The summer I spent working with my parents on their oyster hatchery not only allowed me to expand my knowledge of hatcheries and oyster growth processes, but also developed a wide set of skills.

In any single given day, I found myself employing the same mental exercises that were required in my organic chemistry courses. In my organic chemistry courses, I needed to plan out molecular syntheses. This required not only memorizing a given set of reactions and their limitations, but also thinking about how a given reaction would proceed in my specific problem based on various intricacies such as what side products I would end up with and how those products would influence my synthesis as a whole, how any given molecule would react to a reagent given parameters that took the molecule's structure, electronegativity, and acidity/basicity into account, and then fit all of this knowledge into the bigger picture of how to get from my initial molecule through a series of steps to my final product. Essentially, I needed to think about how to accomplish a series of tasks and end at, or very close, to a given product. At my parent's oyster hatchery, I had to accomplish a series of tasks with different time constraints and priority levels, while taking into account the possibility of my own error or other processes (such as equipment) failing or being delayed in some way. In order to work efficiently and not spend hours staring at tanks fill or shellfish diet to mix into the water column, I began thinking of each of my tasks as a reagent and my day as a molecular synthesis. 

Professionally, I learned how to keep calm under pressure, fix my own mistakes, react to problems that I had absolutely no prior knowledge of, and rely on myself.