Chances are you squandered your summer dissecting frogs in the name of medical science. Or maybe you were an aide to an aide of the undersecretary of transportation in D.C. Or if you were really lucky, you stayed here in Cambridge and fulfilled your biochem requirement.

Sure, you could have fallen victim to the boring routine that characterizes the summers of most Harvard students. But some resourceful upperclass students escaped the Ivory Tower to frolic with poisionous sea serpents and to schmooze with llama-eaters.

Amber L. Keasey '94 just wanted to do a little thesis research during the summer. Examining and recording the mating habits of fish in the Great Barrier Reef seemed a safe enough project, but little did she know it would be hazardous to her health.

During one of her routine dives off the coast of Heron Island, Australia, Keasy encountered more than she had reckoned with. As she filmed her underwater subjects, a four-foot, olive-green sea snake wrapped around her ankles, coiled around her torso and slithered over her shoulder.

"This is a snake that can kill you in six seconds," Keasey says. "I kept thinking `please don't bite me, please don't bite me."

Luckily, Keasey's research assistant was able to free her from the reptile's clutches. And when Keasey met the same snake on later dives, she even named her Claudia.

After receiving grant money from several research groups Keasey spent 28 days diving off a five square-mile island and filming the reproductive customs of the clown fish for research on her biology thesis. Keasy lived in cabins along with other biological researchers and dove three times daily with an assistant.

These fish are extremely interesting, says Keasey, because in the final phases of their lives they change from male to female.

"It's pretty rare in nature for the female to be the final state," says Keasey. "That's why I decided to study them."

While Keasey was surrounded by 12 foot-tiger sharks, water turtles and mantarays in the deep waters of Australia, Arthur P. White '94 braved the forests of central Africa among lions, leopards and crocodiles.

White spent six weeks of the summer conducting geochemical and geophysical surveys on the western border of Tanzania for a geological firm.

White, who lived in an aluminum shack, says he was lucky to have water and electricity in a village where all the native inhabitants live in mud huts.

White says he walked daily around the bush with a magnetometer on his chest and an eight-foot aluminum pole in his hand and took photo samples of the ground which he then examined in the village.

"I was actually applying school maps to study rocks," says White who is a geology concentrator. "Being out in the middle of nowhere with no one in sight...it was pretty exciting."

Bliss M. Dake '94 was walking in the street in San Francisco one day this summer with Lavista, one of the youths he was worked with, and encountered a number of local gangs.