Pacific Index

As a means to meet fellow students, each week, the Index is profiling a current student and their academic, cultural or athletic pursuits. This week senior Shelline Nerup reflects on time at Pacific as she gears up for her upcoming double capstone projects

While Shelline Nerup feels drawn to English literature, most of her attention is drawn to ecological restoration and research—which explains why she has two Capstone projects. A senior double English literature and applied sustainability major, Nerup explains that her senior capstone project for my English lit major “is about the discovery and the documentation of how people’s perception of nature has changed over time.” Nerup is reaching back to the Victorian period—notably Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, as a key piece of her project—to look at this arc over the decades. 

For her second, sustainability capstone, she says, “I’m working with fish and wildlife.” She’s a representative of an organization called Friends of Trees, who she’s been working with on swell analysis within an ecological restoration site, which is part of the Tualatin River Wildlife Refuge project. For Nerup’s capstone she explains that, “it’s going to be an update on kind of the status of where some of our Butland ecological restoration is now, like in our area of the Bamet Valley, as well as kind of how indigenous input is used in determining some of the kind of site prep and where those sites go.”

While Nerup plans on going into a field more closely tied to her applied sustainability major, she is incorporating some of her English literature knowledge into both of her capstones. “When I first was trying to come up with a capstone idea, I was really trying to just have one project that had both of the things together, but I was kind of pulled in two different directions,” she mentions. In the end, her sustainability internship, which she is currently working on, led her to doing a capstone more closely linked to ecological restoration.

“I’m also a part of the Indigenous Student Alliance, so I’m really interested, you know, in that aspect of it and I wanted to partner with that organization specifically because they put on the Wapatato planting or just the plantings that the Wapo wildlife refuge,” Nerup explains. Working with both the Indigenous Student Alliance (ISA) and her internship, it led her to her applied sustainability capstone project. Nerup explains that her main priority at her internship is “doing a lot of research about different, like companies that do soil sampling and what kind of types of sampling they do because basically she tasks me with like, you are going to make a game plan for basically a 14 acreage plot.”

When not preparing for multiple capstone projects, Nerup enjoys the outdoors and spending time with friends. “I enjoy hiking, being outside. Honestly like being anywhere that there’s water, just anywhere close to the water,” she expresses, noting that she grew up on the coast near Lincoln City. When asked what her favorite books to read are, she said, “I mean, Frankenstein is one of my favorites, so that’s kind of like, one of the reasons I picked it for my capstone. But I’m really a fan of the classic horror novels– Dracula’s, also one of my favorites.” As Nerup nears the end of the fall semester of her senior year, she has been spending ample time with friends, while continuing her research at her internship.