After a module full of interaction and meeting some of the foremost scientists in their fields, I have learnt an incredible amount that has helped inform me about so many potential career paths and opportunities. In this post I am going to review this module as a whole and how it has impacted my ambitions and desires.
Careers Workshops
The assorted career workshops and information lectures I attended I have found to be incredibly helpful in this module as I have very little experience of such professional environments and processes.
The assessment centre workshop was probably the most useful and informative of them all though because it showed me how the whole procedure plays out and it showed me how to deal with the stresses involved.
I never had any idea what an assessment centre was, and that experience was therefore invaluable to me.
The CV writing session also informed me greatly on how to improve my resume and looking back on it now compared to today, it used to be clunky, unprofessional and full of irrelevant information.
Though I don’t intend to go into or build a business, be it biological or not, the framework that I have learned about from Chris Walker’s lectures have really helped me.
Having an easy framework to use and simply fill in the blanks for my potential business, appears to take away a lot of the stress and make it less daunting a prospect to try and get a company off the ground should my career aspirations change in the future.
The concept of the Dragon’s Den was sound in theory, but I don’t feel I got much value from it due to what felt like rushed execution, coupled with poor timing with respect to dissertations and other assignments.
Doing it in mid-January as originally planned would have been much better and having it take place either over a full day or even multiple would have allowed the groups involved to flesh out and consider the task much more deeply and better.
Career Themes
The assorted anthropological talks that I have attended have probably had the largest impact over what I want to spend my life doing.
The discussion with Richard Wrangham based on his recent book and this theories regarding how humanity has emerged have inspired me to follow an evolution oriented career path.
The topics covered in these seminars did a great job of bridging the gap between what I know- primates- to what I don’t, particularly Dr Carvalho’s talk which introduced me to anthropology in addition to teaching me about primates.
Whereas before I felt largely interested in the study of primates for their own merits, framing studies of them into a wider evolutionary context, is infinitely more exciting to me.
The seminars relating to human impacts on the Amazonian Woolly monkey or the Malaysian agamids though, were far more sobering, and really brought to home how much we impact our surroundings.
These got me thinking about how aspects of their research into conservation can be transferred to the study of primates.
This makes me wary of the potential affects my research will have (if I ever manage to become a researcher) as many of the species I would be interested in finding out about will likely be very threatened by the time I arrive.
Lastly, though, the herpetological content was also very interesting, I don’t feel it got enough of my attention to warrant spending my career on them.
Career Choice
Before this series of seminars, my preferred career path was to become a researcher in primatology, and following them, I think this ambition has only been solidified and built upon.
The lectures given by Dr Sarah Papworth and James Hicks have both made the conservation biology of their respective species seem much more attractive than I had anticipated though.
When I started this course I only thought of conservation biology as a mainly political arena, where I’d be largely dealing with education of people to protect the local fauna.
I had not considered the actual science of the niches that these animals live in, and looking at it now, conservation biology would be an incredibly impactful and valuable career to follow, given the aforementioned destruction of our planet that we are causing.
Equally, the discussion with Richard Wrangham regarding his recent book has also been highly informative of potential avenues that a career in research could take and what the process is really like for writing.
Wrangham’s comments about the difficulty and hurdles he has encountered in regards to writing academic texts does put me off that aspect of academia somewhat though.
I never had any intention of starting a business or becoming an entrepreneur, so the Chris Walker business plan lectures I don’t think will be of great use to me.
However, the framework and information about how to get one off the ground is definitely a great fall back to have.
Thoughts
I regret that I didn’t make more of an effort to forge connections with any of the guest speakers that came to the module sessions.
It was an incredible opportunity to get a foot in the door with academics and begin to expand my connections in the world of research, but I didn’t make the most of it.
Part of this regret also comes as a consequence of my reluctance to use social media to attempt to network with these guest speakers.
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