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This summer, TJ French begins each day with a familiar routine. From his apartment located on the east side of campus, he heads on foot through the university’s 100-acre Ecosystem Preserve. 
 
“That commute through the woods every morning is a good buffer for me between waking up and being at work,” said French ‘28, a double major in computer science and environmental science from Petersburg, Michigan.

Establishing regular rhythms

When French arrives on the other side of the woods, he’s at the university’s Lake Drive greenhouse, where he begins each day meeting with fellow students on the ecological restoration crew—his research team for the summer. 

The team spends time transplanting native plants at the greenhouse and then plants, mulches, and installs curb-cut rain gardens and parkway pocket gardens at various locations throughout the city. These activities result in slowing down stormwater that otherwise heads directly to Plaster Creek along with the pollutants from roadways and yards, affecting water quality in the creek for people and creatures downstream. 
 
“When I signed up to be part of the crew this summer, I didn’t know more about the Plaster Creek Stewards than the paragraph on the signup sheet,” said French. “But I knew it was this organization helping to restore the watershed and it was a job working outside, so that sounded cool.” 
 
French, alongside students and faculty, are daily working on restoration efforts within one of west Michigan’s most contaminated watersheds. His work has a fairly predictable rhythm. But one late July morning was anything but textbook.

Making a rare discovery

On this day, French and his fellow Calvin students joined local experts and community partners to help with their mussel survey research. 
 
Donned in chest-high waders, French set out into the creek in a local park and begin to run his hands along the creek’s floor. The goal was to find mussels, pull them up, identify them, and then place them safely back in the water. 
 
“We went into this hoping to find maybe five or 10 mussels,” said French. “And we found hundreds of them.” 
 
While the volume of mussels they found was impressive, French made one of the rare discoveries of the day—pulling up a lilliput—a state endangered species. 
 
“It was a big surprise,” said French. “It was really cool to find something you weren’t expecting. Finding those couple of important species was really exciting and a cool discovery.” 

“This is the kind of ecological surprise that reinforces everything we’re doing to restore this space,” said Andrea Lubberts, program manager for Plaster Creek Stewards. “Mussels are like the ‘livers of the river’—filtering water, stabilizing stream beds, and signaling overall stream health. The fact that they’re here in these numbers tells us we have something to preserve as well as restore for the future of Plaster Creek.”

Confirming Calvin to be the right fit

French and the team’s discoveries this past month hold importance for the work being done to restore the watershed. And his experience on this team and through his studies at Calvin has reinforced his college decision. 

“I visited a lot of schools in my last year of high school, and Calvin was just one them. My general conclusion from visiting was they were all kind of the same, so it was hard to decide in the end,” said French.  
 
But he said the fact Calvin is a Christian university played a major factor in his decision to enroll and reinforced his decision to continue his studies on the Grand Rapids campus. 
 
“I definitely value my faith very highly, and I want to continue to put my faith first in my life,” said French. “I went to a public high school, so this was my first experience with Christian education, and it’s been really good to see how faith can be integrated into science courses and STEM courses, to see there’s a scientific explanation for everything and a religious explanation for anything that exists, and they are connected.”