Why Porter, twice
“The first time I came to Porter it was because it was close and my friends were going. I was in biology because I liked my high school biology teacher. That's not nothing, but it's not a plan. Spring of 2022 my dad had a heart attack, the farm needed hands, and I was failing organic chemistry anyway. I left without telling my adviser. I owed the library eleven dollars.
“I spent three years on nights at the cheese plant in Halsey. Good money, steady. But I kept reading about the river on my breaks. When there was a fish kill below the dam in 2024, I wanted to know why, and I realized nobody at the plant could tell me.”
Gabriel returned in fall 2025 through readmission, which he says took “one form, one phone call and the eleven dollars.” He is now a senior in Biology, and the Bridge to Completion Fund covered the balance he still owed from 2022.
The hands-on part
Gabriel works 12 hours a week as a paid field and lab assistant in the Freshwater & Watershed Laboratory, which monitors water quality in the Porter River and the Millrace channel.
- Fieldwork: twice a week, May through October, waders on, measuring dissolved oxygen, temperature and turbidity at six stations from the dam to the Riverfront Trail footbridge.
- His capstone (BIOL 4900): a survey of freshwater mussel beds below the restored Millrace weir, comparing them with counts from 2011. “Mussels are the river's long memory. They live forty years. They remember every bad summer.”
- Funding: a $1,200 student research grant paid for a used underwater viewer and a lot of zip-top bags.
He will present his results at the undergraduate research symposium in April. Preliminary count: mussel density is up about 30% since the Millrace restoration, which Porter Falls Magazine covered last spring.
A hard semester
“The hard semester was the one I didn't finish. But coming back had its own hard part. I was 23 in classes with 19-year-olds, and the first exam back I froze, because the last time I'd taken a chemistry exam here it went so badly I left.
“I told my lab supervisor, which I would not have done at 19. She sent me to Counseling Services for test anxiety and told me to take organic again with a different instructor, which I did. A-minus. Turns out I didn't hate chemistry. I hated being nineteen and scared and not telling anyone.”
His mentor in the lab, he says, made the difference. “She treats me like a colleague who's still learning, not a student who's behind. Those are very different jobs. See working with a research mentor if you want the official version.”
A field day on the Millrace
Monitoring days start at the lab's truck behind the science building at 7 a.m., with a cooler of sample bottles and a checklist that Gabriel admits he now enjoys.
| Station | Where | What they measure |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Above the dam | Temperature, dissolved oxygen, a water sample for nutrients |
| 2–3 | The Millrace head gate and restored weir | Flow, turbidity, and the mussel transect for his capstone |
| 4–5 | Below the Depot District outfalls | The same readings, plus a bacteria sample after rain |
| 6 | Riverfront Trail footbridge | The final reading, and usually a question from a jogger |
“People on the Riverfront Trail stop and ask what we're doing all the time. I tell them we're checking on the river. Everybody in Porter Falls has an opinion about the river, so it's a long conversation.”
The night-shift years, he says, made him a better field biologist. “I know how to stay alert at 5 a.m. I know how to follow a checklist when I'm bored. And I know how to tell a supervisor something went wrong without making it worse. The plant taught me all three.”
What’s next
Gabriel graduates in May 2027 and is applying for water-resources technician jobs with county conservation departments, with an eye on a master's degree later. The farm is still in the family; his dad is fine and “more interested in my mussels than I expected.”
“If you left, you can come back. Pay the eleven dollars. Then go tell somebody you're scared. That's the part I skipped the first time.”
Fictional information
UW–Porter Falls is a work of parody. Gabriel Hensrud is an invented student: there is no such person, and every quotation, class, grade, job, hometown and anecdote in this profile is fictional. Halsey, Wesconsin, the cheese plant, the 2024 fish kill and his mussel counts are invented; no real river survey is described here.