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Home
> Education & Careers
> resources
> teg
> Issue 27
> TEG Issue 27: Interview with a final year ecology undergraduate by Susan Barker
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Electronic TEGPublished in TEG news issue 27, Spring 2001, by the British Ecological Society. Interview with a final year ecology undergraduateby Susan Barker What is the title of your project? The effect of tree diversity on leaf litter arthropods. What stage are you at? I am currently writing it up, it has to be handed in next week.- aagh!!! What are the benefits of doing a research project? I am not sure what the benefits are. I suppose now I know how hard real science is. In lectures you just get told about peoples studies and you do not get an appreciation of how hard they have to work to get those results. At least I can say I have gained some practical skills from my degree, and not just theory from class. It should be useful in my future career. I would like to go into environmental consultancy. What are the drawbacks? It is very stressful to do in your final year. I have my finals coming up and I should be revising for those. I do not feel I can at the moment as all my time is spent on the project. In some universities, students do their research project after their finals which they have before Easter. This seems much more sensible to me. It means you can do your project without so much pressure and the weather is better as well for field work. Also sometimes Tutors can be hard to get hold of. They have their own research work to do, and from talking to my friends some tutors have been far from helpful. One girl I know her tutor went on holiday for 2 weeks, and has just come back with a week to go till hand in, and she doesn't know if she has done any of the statistics right. I think sometimes the tutors expect you to have all the skills to do research but we do not have any training in research methods- it seems a little unfair. All the maths stuff is way above my head, and we have not covered any of it in our taught classes. How did you organise your work? I organised the work with my tutor. Did you get any money to help you with your expenses? I should be getting some expenses back but, it is only œ50 allocated to each project which is more than I spent on petrol and stuff. What about the safety aspects of doing fieldwork? We had to fill in all the proper safety forms and have a meeting with the departmental safety officer. However it was more to do with hazards rather than personal safety. As a female I felt very vulnerable going to remote sites on my own - I asked my Mum and Dad to come with me and although it was not very convenient for them as they live a long way away I was much happier to have someone with me. What would you do differently now your project is coming to a close? I think if I was to do anything differently, I would have started doing the field work earlier, to give me more time with the identification and stuff. It is too easy to put it all off!!!! I think it is harder to do a fieldwork project just because you have to have to do all the practical and statistical skills as well as researching. At least you know if you are doing a library based project that the library is there, with a field one there is no certainty of the results! Were there any books you found particularly useful? I found a lot of the books were either too simple or too hard, particularly with the methods! I tried to take bits form a range of books to help me. There was certainly not one book which I found indispensable and that I could recommend to students next year - its a shame really as I could have really done with one! Have you heard of the British Ecological Society? I had not heard of them until doing my project. A found a really good book about the Ecology of Mixed stands of tree species, it was really useful. It was a symposium volume and I found it much easier to read than a lot of technical papers. As all the papers were related it showed how ecology is inter-related. I have now looked at the BES web-site and if I carry on in ecology I will definitely apply to join - do they want students like me?
Of course!! Many thanks to our student who nobly agreed at this stressful time!
Susan Barker | ||||||
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teg
Issue 26
