Name: Dave Matthews
Class: Senior
Hometown: Bedford, MA
Birthday: July 2
Residence: Off-Campus
Campus Involvement: Junior Fellows
Zodiac Sign: Cancer
Major: Marine Biology
Relationship Status: Taken
Her Campus: What were you thinking of doing after college?
Dave Matthews: Well, I’m probably going to move to Indonesia to be a dive master for scuba diving.
HC: How did you get that position?
DM: I’ve been doing a lot of scuba diving as a marine biologist. I took Indonesian last semester to learn the language, and someone I knew from there put me in contact with someone else who could hook me up with the position. Apparently he works with some ridiculously rich family that is building a dive resort in Bali and they need a good dive master, so hopefully I get it.
HC: What made you want to do scuba diving?
DM: All that I’ve done with marine biology research has involved at least a little bit of diving, and I think diving is the most fun aspect of the job, aside from the research aspect. However, around here the water’s freezing and there’s not a lot of biodiversity in the oceans. In Indonesia, it’s the polar opposite. It has one of the highest rates of biodiversity in the ocean on the planet. A side note: but when I took Indonesian, I learned that “orangutan” means “person of the forest,” and an “American” is “orang American,” so an orangutan is kind of like “person of a forest nationality.” Lexical beauty.
HC: Cool. What has been your favorite research with marine biology?
DM: The one I’m doing now is pretty cool. I used to do a lot of work with mantis shrimp in my internships to get experience, and I think they’re one of the coolest crustaceans ever. However, what I’m doing now is also really interesting. I’m studying high-speed video of fish to see how good the fish are at feeding, and how that skill at feeding is related to the contents of their genome. I actually just finished a big poster for a symposium on Tuesday the Junior Fellows will be doing.
HC: That’s awesome, what are the Junior Fellows?
DM: The junior fellows are six seniors who are highly involved in research within the biology department. We have weekly meetings with faculty so they can see and hear our work, as well as to show our work to a bunch of science students. The symposium will also be a good chance to show it to higher-ups in the field.
HC: Wow! What else are you involved in?
DM: Not much that’s based with the school, but some of the hobbies that I have are playing guitar and playing soccer. I also have a motorcycle that I like to ride.
HC: Given your name, it seems appropriate that you play guitar. Did you ever try to start a Dave Matthews Band 2.0?
DM: I tried to in High School a bit, but it never really went anywhere. I had gotten back into playing guitar a lot over last semester and winter break, teaching myself how to fingerpick by playing “Blackbird” a lot, and just in general getting better at playing other people’s songs. Never really wrote anything, though, but maybe in the future I will once I learn more music theory. I haven’t been playing as much this semester because I’ve had a lot of work. The playing takes more time than you think, sometimes.
HC: Oh well, how about soccer, did you play here at all?
DM: Over the summer at my last internship I was playing for about two hours a day six days a week, but since school really picked up I haven’t done all that much. I guess it’s been kind of a realization for me that I can’t do everything at once. Oh well.
HC: Definitely true. What’s one of your favorite memories from UMass?
DM: Can I say endless raspberries at the DCs?
HC: Sure, but there’s got to be something better.
DM: OK. Well, freshman year we held an “intervention” for one of our friends who was a vegetarian. We sat her down and all wrote her letters, and one of my friends’ letters said “Whether you believe in evolution or God or whatever, someone gave you your incisors to eat meat, and you’re denying them that purpose.” Well, it turns out that she had fake incisors because hers didn’t really grow in, but we didn’t know that at the time. So she pulled out her fake incisors and set them on the desk, which was extremely shocking. That, and there were a lot of other things that happened, like when we hiked the Notch during a blizzard, which was a stupid idea.
If you crash into Dave Matthews on campus, make sure to say Hi! He has so much to say.