The water was still as the boat rocked in the July heat, 20 miles off Florida’s Gulf Coast. Standing at its edge, Loma Jones watched the ocean’s surface as though it was speaking. In a way, it was.
Below the surface, a dark shadow cut past the hull. A shark. A sentinel of ocean health. The kind of animal that ignited something in Jones long before she had the words to name it. She doesn’t flinch. She doesn’t reach for her phone. She leans forward.
A month earlier, Jones stood at a very different edge, the stage for Merrill Auditorium in downtown Portland, Maine. Looking out at a sea of faces – Unity’s largest graduating class to date – Jones, student speaker for the Class of 2025, spoke with calm, resonant clarity. “I told my mom, ‘I wanted to be a marine biologist at age seven,” she said. “I just didn’t know how long the road would be, or how many times I’d have to reroute.”
Jones was raised in Beaufort, South Carolina, where brackish estuaries wrap around old homes and marsh grass whispers secrets. As a girl, she spent afternoons running across Hunting Island Beach and daydreaming about what was lurking beneath the waves, imagining a life in science. But real life rarely moves on the tide of imagination alone. Jones dropped out of college twice. She failed chemistry four times. She thought maybe the dream was too big.
And then came the jet ski.
One day, while working in the heat of the Atlantic Ocean as a jet ski tour guide, she filled out a contact form from Unity on Instagram, an impulsive click, something between curiosity and wishful thinking. She forgot about it until the phone rang. “They didn’t ask me to explain myself,” she remembers. “They just said, ‘We see you. Let’s get to work.’”
Unity’s programs are online, yes, but, as Jones explains, they are anything but passive. Asynchronous doesn’t mean effortlessness. Jones was working full time at the Georgia Aquarium while also managing a photography business. Still, she logged on, night after night, diving into policy documents from NOAA, scientific literature on fish physiology, and case studies in sustainable aquaculture. The coursework demanded evidence, precision, and voice. She hadn’t just returned to school. She had entered it, fully.
“I had never been so hopeful for what was to come and so excited about all I was accomplishing!” she said. “Not just to understand, but to defend my thinking. I could talk about eutrophication, migratory behavior and coastal resilience. But more than that I knew how it all connected.”
She made the Dean’s List. Earned the Nicholas Holt Challenge Scholarship. Delivered the Commencement speech to a national audience of graduates who had, like her, carried too much for too long. Staring out into that audience of her proven peers, Loma offered a simple prayer: “A wise person once said, “If you knew all along what you were destined to become, and how hard the journey would be you may have never become what you are. I pray we have all enjoyed our adventures.”
Now, out on the water, she is part of the research team at Minorities in Shark Sciences, a nationally recognized nonprofit that puts women of color at the forefront of elasmobranch research. “When people picture this work, they don’t picture us. But we’ve always been here,” she says. “I want the next generation to know there’s room. I want them to see me and not be surprised.”
Her current work tracks elasmobranchs, sharks, skates, and rays, analyzing how warming waters disrupt migratory patterns, behavior, and ecosystem dynamics. It’s a complex science, but she talks about it plainly: “It’s not just about fish. It’s about systems. Policy. Food security. Environmental justice. Unity taught me how to ask the questions that matter and paint the full picture. That’s the magic of science.”
Her life, now, is an overlay of motion and meaning fieldwork on the coast, mentorship for young people stepping into STEM, hours logged in aquarium systems and online policy briefings. She moves between those worlds without apology. In one of the most resonant moments of her Commencement address, she told her fellow graduates, “This role goes beyond being great environmentalists. It’s about being great neighbors, friends, and mentors. The work does not end with us.”
Jones isn’t interested in exceptionalism. She wants to be an example. She wants to be a part of the alumni who help bring environmental unity across the globe. “I never want to be done with my Unity family. They should always expect ideas and good news from me, because that is what they have instilled in me. Evolutionary ideas, that keep growing.” And in that way, her story is more than personal. It’s fundamental proof of what happens when ambition is with rigor, with the expectation to rise.
