I have now finished the other course I had at UNIS, so I only have internship working every day now. I am really enjoying just working from nine till four every day, with every evening completely off. I fully appreciate not having something school-related that should be done hanging over me at all times. Especially after an intense exam period it is very nice to be able to relax without a bad conscience all the time.
Since the exam, I have started my data management block work for SIOS. I have started working with a data set on phytoplankton now. It consists of the amount of different classes of phytoplankton found in Kongsfjorden. This work I am doing now is done in cooperation with researchers at the Norwegian Polar Institute. After my work on it, the data set will be made publicly available on the Polar Institute’s webpage. This work is part of one of SIOS’ main goals, to make data more available and more accessible for everyone.
This work is more biology-related compared to my previous work at SIOS. I enjoy working with biological data and learning more about phytoplankton, even though my main interest within biology is terrestrial biology. Previously I have been working with several biological data sets and I think that helps with my understanding of the data I am working with now, even though it is about plankton which I don’t know too much about already.
Exactly what I am doing now is rewriting the data set with standardized variables instead of the variables the researcher has chosen. This will make the data set easier to understand for others who want to use the data, as the standardized variables are used by many researchers and are defined so you can read explanations for each variable at the Darwin Core webpage.
I now have a new supervisor who is working with data management every day, so he has many good advises to give to help me get going. The disadvantage is that I am now mainly working alone, contra before when being a bigger part of SIOS Knowledge Centre. I have realized that I definitely enjoy working with a group instead of just with one other person, but I think it is good to get some experience with both, to see the advantage and disadvantage with both working environments.
