I’ve started my internship experience at bioCEED and have so far worked here for a good normal work week in terms of hours. I’ve been doing a variety of things from graphic design (figures), meetings, video production and other small things. And most of the time have been spent in the biology department of UNIS with my supervisor, Eike.
Student and employee culture
A big difference between spending time here compared to the normal class setting, is that here people are mostly up to their own projects – hammering away on something in their office spaces. Not like in a class, were you’re all up and close, with the same tasks and goals. There is also a big knowledge/experience gap, I’m just a simple bachelor student, while the rest who work here have years of experience working with biology related matters. The latter does make it easier if I have any questions related to my work.
A bit on what I’ve been doing
The “learningarticibiologi.info” project, were most of my work will be present, has its content focus on AB-201 Terrestrial Arctic Biology. Which is a course I did last semester. This means, that when I’m producing illustrative figures, it really helps already having the relevant biological knowledge. Creating figures takes time, and if you do a mistake in terms of the figure mispresenting the scientific knowledge, you can easily end up wasting hours on something that turns out to be completely useless. I’ve also worked on a bigger video project, which aims to teach the use of a quadrat (scientific tool, can be used to describe vegetation) in a terrestrial Arctic environment. This video has a lot of elements, animations, figures, video and audio. It’s close to being finished and I’m quite happy with it so far. Here it also helps that I’ve been using quadrats in the field before. But still, being able to do something is one thing – another thing is being able to teach this skill to others. And the teaching/communicating knowledge part is something I’d like to be better at, as I think it’s an important skill to have in any setting. Some time have also been spent on meetings, where I get to know a bit of the insides of how bioCEED and UNIS in general are working, and what challenges and goals they are struggling/working with. Which have been quite interesting.
Going on from here
The plan ahead is to finish the things I’m working on now, and me and my supervisor are planning to work more closely together is shaping the next literature content for learningarcticbiology.info. I will also be attending a conference with the bioCEED student representative from UNIS in Bergen, in the beginning of March.
Later,
Simen
