Long before she saw it, Rachel Carson loved the ocean. When Carson was growing up in Pennsylvania, she found fossilized shells around her home, evidence that an ocean had covered the area millions of years before. But it wasn't until Carson was an adult that she finally got to visit the ocean. After she graduated from college in 1929, Carson spent a summer studying at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory on the coast of Massachusetts. Her fascination with the ocean grew as she learned more about it in graduate school and as an editor for the Fish and Wildlife Service.