Welcome, 2026 Interns!

Each summer, MCFA is fortunate to add a few undergraduate college interns to our team. These students bring new energy and great passion to our mission, and we love the fresh perspectives they bring to our work. This year, we have Bowdoin students Julia Costle and Lorenzo Shields - join us in welcoming them to our office!

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Hi! My name is Julia Costle, and I am a rising junior at Bowdoin College. I am a Government and Legal Studies and Education Coordinate major and an Urban Studies minor. I am from Mill Valley, California—just a few minutes from San Francisco. In my free time, I love to play soccer, surf, run, and paint! At Bowdoin, I am most involved with an elementary school mentoring program, the women’s club soccer team, the Bowdoin Outing Club, and running the social media for Bowdoin Athletics. Post-grad, I hope to go to law school and shape policy at the intersection of environmental stewardship, economic resilience, and community well-being.

My lifelong love for the water initially drew me into fisheries and working waterfront research. This summer I will be expanding MCFA’s black sea bass project—a citizen science project that will use fishermen-collected data to inform fishery management decisions and to prepare for a directed black sea bass fishery. I will also be collaborating with Holly Parker, director of the Schiller Coastal Studies Center, to analyze how fishermen and lobstermen interact with science and policy in Maine. I am excited to join MCFA this summer!

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My name is Lorenzo Shields, and I am a rising sophomore at Bowdoin College. I’ve been a passionate recreational fisherman and seafood lover since the age of three. I grew up in the dry desert border town of El Paso, Texas, which is a hard life for a fisherman, so I'm super excited to be living and working here in Maine. I try to be out on the water as much as possible and take advantage of all the outdoor experiences that Maine has to offer.

I am a prospective Environmental Studies and Biology major at Bowdoin, where I’m a sprinter on the Track & Field team, a line cook at our award-winning dining hall, and a member of the swing dance club. Through my work with the MCFA, I hope to interact with and learn more about the commercial side of fisheries, the intricacies of the Gulf of Maine, and the efforts to preserve Maine’s working waterfronts.

I hope to work in many areas of MCFA this summer, from the ongoing black sea bass monitoring project to inventorying working waterfronts up and down the coast of Maine and working with fishermen to help measure and track the rising water temperatures in the Gulf of Maine.