They call me Simen, and I’m currently a bachelor student in arctic biology. I grew up in Bergen, and first started studying and dreaming about working with something related to media and communications, but later decided to start studying biology at Nord University in Bodø, Norway. Anything related to biology have always interested me, and I don’t regret switching paths. After two years in Bodø, I figured a change in environment would be nice, so I traveled up to UNIS here on Svalbard where I’ve spent one semester and currently doing my second. One of the courses I’m taking this semester is AB-208 Internship in Arctic Biology. Here, several students will be placed in a company where we can gain much needed experience of how it is to do hard and sweaty work.
I will be staying with bioCEED, which is a rather young organization whose primary goal is to improve biology education. My main tasks will likely involve around a bioCEED/UNIS- project supported by Svalbard Environmental Fund, which is a type of online learning platform called “learning arctic biology” (The site you’re using now). This platform’s goal is to contain the relevant knowledge required for biology students to pass their course here at UNIS (With focus AB-201 Terrestrial Arctic Biology). It will mainly feature written articles and videos created by us at UNIS which I will help produce. This content will not just deal with arctic biology knowledge, but also give students a way to learn how do to sampling in the arctic and other practical tasks that are crucial for any aspiring biologist.
Since this learning platform will use digital media as the way to communicate the knowledge to students, I got really excited about their work and wanted to be apart of it, and I’m happy that I now will. It’s a bit scary and exciting at the same time, and while doing anything new is scary, it usually goes well in the end. It’s hard to know what to expect from all of this, we always have an expectation in our head of how something will be, and it always turns out a bit different from what we do expect. But that’s the fun part about doing something new. However, it’s going to be a great experience to have under the belt, it will be interesting to see how bioCEED operates and to gain skills with working with people who do this for a living. I also hope I can teach them some new tricks too. This blog will be the first of three blogs I will be doing about my internship, so stay tuned whoever decided to read this!
Simen
