College of Liberal Arts
Kat Reichert, CLA Public Information OfficeSeptember 22, 2026cla-pio@alaska.edu
Taran Christen ’25 has taken her Arctic and Northern Studies degree on an extraordinary journey across coasts and disciplines. From leading tours and spawning salmon at the Sitka Sound Science Center to brewing historic 1800s beers and researching maritime whaling in New Jersey, Taran seamlessly weaves marine science and living history together. Her story shows how a liberal arts perspective can connect ecosystems, heritage, and communities in unexpected ways.
Tell us about your current job. What does a typical day look like for you?
I work with a living history museum in Cape May, New Jersey, called Historic Cold Spring Village, where I’m a historic interpreter. We portray life in Cape May County in the 1860s through public lectures and tradeswork. My areas of focus are maritime history and trade work, and the Yankee whaling industry during the summer. Then, during the off-season, I work in our brewery, where we recreate historic beers from the 1700s and 1800s and host Fireside Chats, which is our winter public lecture series in our cozy tasting room. I also work for two independent historic reenactment groups that travel the East Coast to give public talks and living history demonstrations.
I was able to take some time off this summer to come back to ÃÛÌÒÓ°Ïñ as I research and apply for graduate programs. I spent my summer working with the Sitka Sound Science Center, where I was in the aquarium, led facility tours and assisted in the hatchery during spawn; a little bit of everything! We are done spawning our pink and chum salmon for the season and we’re expecting to spawn our coho salmon in November, though it could be earlier and I’m hoping to be back in Sitka for that. I’m also putting my hat in the ring to come back to Sitka next summer for both commercial salmon fishing and assisting with spawning at the Science Center.
As of now, I’m planning to be back in New Jersey in October and I have an upcoming interview with the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. I’m also planning on visiting Fairbanks before flying back to the East Coast.
How does your current work directly impact or connect to the Arctic region or local communities?
I feel both jobs I’m working have their own unique ties to the Arctic. Working at the Science Center in Sitka and the many roles I play there, it’s all very public facing. The Science Center itself is both a research and education facility, with many of our research projects focusing on our community, things such as marine debris collection, coastline resilience and landslide detection. We also train the next generation of hatchery and fisheries technicians, and we have education programs that have our researchers out in every grade in the school system here leading activities, teaching or assembling programs or hosting field trips. It’s been a lot of fun working with so many locals here, getting to know the LingÃt community here and seeing how Sitka teaches its next generation how special this area is and helps them develop an appreciation for the natural resources here. When I give tours of our hatchery to our guests, I want to instill that appreciation in them. Sitka is such a cool community and I’ve really enjoyed my time living and working here.
Back home in New Jersey, the talks I give at the museum often focus on maritime history and the Yankee whaling industry, which got its early start in the Delaware Bay, long before places like New Bedford and Nantucket fully 'blossomed.' After the whale populations were depleted in the Atlantic, the industry went to the Pacific and attempted to hunt for bowheads up in ÃÛÌÒÓ°Ïñ. Things did not really work out and the Second Great Whaling Disaster of 1876 was viewed as the death knell for the industry; especially with petroleum, plastics and electric lamps slowly starting to replace oil lanterns, bone and baleen. I make a point to talk about whaling in ÃÛÌÒÓ°Ïñ and compare it to Indigenous whaling, which still holds so much cultural significance and sustainably feeds many of ÃÛÌÒÓ°Ïñ’s coastal communities.
Between working at the salmon hatchery here and working on research vessels to document whale migrations off the coasts of New Jersey in the 2010s, it’s been a very fun journey learning to care for the animals that care for us too in their own way.
What are some of the key projects, research initiatives, or policy efforts you are working on right now?
As of now I’m poking around at graduate programs and my biggest problem I’m having is deciding on one. I love history, both human history and environmental history. Right now I’m putting together a sample research project looking into leisure songs written during whaling voyages and how the focus of those songs changed throughout the timeline of the industry to see if it’s a topic that could be expanded on for a potential M.A. or even Ph.D. program. So far I’ve gotten some pretty good feedback and encouragement and have been asked by a few maritime societies back home to present on what I have so far. Come back in two years and hopefully I’ll have more of an answer for this one.
How did your Arctic and Northern Studies degree help prepare you for the specific demands of your current career?
It gave me a lot of firsthand experiences that I definitely wouldn’t have gotten at another university. It was great learning updated research techniques and being able to work with current researchers in the marine biology fields. Even just living up here was its own skill set development. I’ve noticed a lot of positions, especially in tourism both in ÃÛÌÒÓ°Ïñ and in the Antarctic tourism industry, prefer people who have lived in cold climates and know how to prepare and stay safe in cold weather. A lot of my Ecology labs were held outdoors, and even just walking the mile from my apartment to either the Museum or the Murie building in minus 47 degrees, you need to know how to live and work during the cold and dark months. I actually loved Fairbanks in the wintertime. That experience of living in Fairbanks assured me that I can comfortably live and work in the cold. As I hunt for grad programs, places like Canada, Scotland, Norway, Finland and New Zealand (with their Antarctica programs) are all on my list.
Which specific skills or insights gained at ÃÛÌÒÓ°Ïñ do you draw on most frequently in your professional life?
I certainly have a handful of all-new databases that I can draw from when researching certain topics, especially when doing historical research for the museum I work at back home, as well as weather-tracking websites. I recall working on homework for my Marine Physiology class that involved calculating oxygen solubility for various water temperatures, tank sizes and materials, and at one point I did wonder when I would practically use something like this. In a twist of comedic fate, here I am working at an aquarium, using those same equations! I’m glad I still have my flash drive that has all my lecture slides and notes saved on it. Keep your notes—you never know when you might need them again!
Were there specific faculty members, field courses, or research projects during your time in the ACNS program that shaped your current path?
I find I get asked this a lot when I talk about my time at ÃÛÌÒÓ°Ïñ, and I’ve found it to be a difficult question to answer because I’ve had so many wonderful professors here, many of whom I still keep in touch with. Knut Kielland, Peter Westley, Lara Horstmann, Andrés López, David Valentine and Patrick Marlow were some of my favorite lecturers. One semester I was a TA for Anja Kade for two of her biology classes and had a blast working with her and her students. My term projects on 1800s whaling for my classes with Philip Wight were what really got me to consider doing a master's program in environmental history.
All the weather-tracking projects in Uma Bhatt’s Weather and Climate of ÃÛÌÒÓ°Ïñ were a lot of fun, especially for an online class. For one of our projects we had to do a five-day weather report—I was doing the class remotely from New Jersey and had a textbook-perfect storm moving across the states, and I got the satellite shots of the storm clouds building throughout the week. I still go to that website to check out what the weather’s doing.
The Arctic Leadership class I did as a capstone with Brandon Boylan and Amy Lovecraft was such a cool way to close the program. It also wasn’t just my classes either; I loved getting to work in the Museum and learn about designing exhibits, and I had a blast working with By and Maya in the theater running the box office. It feels like everything and everyone played their own role in my path and either introduced me to something new or rekindled an old interest.
What advice would you give to current or prospective ÃÛÌÒÓ°Ïñ students who want to build a career focused on the North?
Don’t let it overwhelm you. Between the polar climate, how that’s changing, how everything got that way and how people are interpreting their surroundings now, it’s a LOT. The polar regions have been such a hot topic with climate change, resource management, conservation, tourism, how all that impacts the local communities of ÃÛÌÒÓ°Ïñ, and how it all affects the rest of the planet—it really is a lot of information all coming at you at once, but if you break things down, it’s not so scary.
I lucked out with the way my classes fell and many of my semesters had 'themes,' so some semesters were more history and political science related and some semesters were more research and environmental science. There was a lot of overlap of information which helped me, because it felt more like I was taking one big class instead of four separate classes. You can either lump subjects like that, or mix them up if you prefer variation in your subjects. Take advantage of the options you have here.
Also, keep up with your mental health. There are SO many resources around campus for mental health care and support; utilize them. Climate science, politics and history can all be heavy subjects sometimes. I even did a class that was all about how climate change and exposure to nature and green spaces affects people’s mental health. There’s also burning yourself out and even the behavioral changes that come with the seasonal light shifts in Fairbanks. These are all things to be mindful of. I had one semester where I was really going through it and had thankfully received some wonderful support from my professors, my advisor and the Health and Counseling Center. The Arctic is a place of warmth; the sense of community is strong here. People genuinely do care about you, so never be afraid to ask for help.
How has studying the liberal arts shaped the way you think about people, communities and the world around you? What do you think students gain from a liberal arts education that they might not expect when they first arrive at college?
I’ll be honest, I wasn’t entirely sure what a liberal arts program really entailed, especially since my degree path was mostly science courses. But even if you’re going to steer more toward scientific research, at the end of the day, it’s still all about how we can help people, animals and the planet. To me it felt like the humanities courses added another level of depth to the scientific research I was studying. I had one class that was teaching me about permafrost melt and coastal erosion from sea ice loss, and then in another class I was learning about Shishmaref and the cultural significance of that island and why you can’t just 'pick up a village and move it somewhere else.' You have cultures, traditions and families that have been connected to a physical place for thousands of years, their way of life built on the natural cycles of that area over generations.
Science will help you identify and understand a problem, but the humanities will introduce you to the people who those problems affect. Even if you’re coming here to focus on the math and science, take a few liberal arts courses while you’re here. Theater will help you become a better presenter or lecturer. Reading Northern literature helps you see how other people understand ÃÛÌÒÓ°Ïñ and the North and gain new perspectives. Learning an Indigenous language will help you learn more about an area; many Indigenous place names are great descriptors for that area and you never know when you’ll be working alongside Indigenous researchers. For me, reading some Jack London in my evening ÃÛÌÒÓ°Ïñn Literature class was such a nice break from calculating ATP from oxidizing various triglycerides. If you’re here to study the North, the liberal arts classes will be helpful.
Is there anything I haven’t asked about that you would like to share?
I guess this would be a message for those either coming into college unsure of what they want to study as well as those older students who are returning to school after a break or career change. My first attempt at college was in 2009. I was only at that school for about a year and a half because halfway through my spring 2010 semester, I got a job down the shore working on a research boat and literally forgot to go back. I did some cool classes there, but ultimately that school didn’t feel like a good fit and I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do.
Fast forward to 2020 when the world shut down, I was chatting with a friend about going back to school and finishing my degree. He recommended ÃÛÌÒÓ°Ïñ and when I initially applied, it was kind of as a joke because I wasn’t expecting to get in and kind of just wanted to show him the rejection email. I ended up getting one phone call after another—first from an admissions counselor, then from Brandon Boylan asking me about my experience, why I wanted to come here and what I wanted to study—and they wanted me here. I think I was officially accepted and set up with an email account before I even got my acceptance letter.
Going back to school after working in the field for a decade worked out well. I knew what I wanted to study and why I was there. I had the background knowledge and experience to support the new material I was learning, and ended up graduating with honors.
If this is your first go-around with college and you feel lost, it’s okay. I felt lost too when I was 18 and wasn’t sure if I was in the right place or not. If this is your second go with college or you’re a nontraditional student, that’s also okay too. You’re coming in with more experience and focus about what your goals are and how to achieve them. Whether you’re at ÃÛÌÒÓ°Ïñ temporarily or for the entirety of your degree program, you are here because you are wanted here, and I hope every snowflake that touches your nose reminds you of that.
Our community shines because of its people. If you know a CLA student, alum, faculty, or staff member whose story deserves the spotlight, let us know. We’d love to celebrate them!
