Even though my internship was technically over I still had a few hours left over due to time lost due to COVID. Over the past month I have been doing little bits and pieces for bioCEED as my time comes to an end. I have been helping out with overseeing surveys, advising improvements for the bioCEED website homepage, wrapping up my work on the learning arctic biology worksite to pass the work back to Eike (who was originally working on the website), writing species descriptions for the field guide and I’m general wrapping things up. It has been a nice […]
bioCEED
The past 6 months have absolutely flown by. Unfortunately, this means my time at bioCEED has come to an end. Over the past 2 months I have settled back into “normal” life back in Australia. My work within bioCEED has been focusing on getting microbiology and lichen ready to be published. This has involved proof-reading, editing and coordinating with the authors of those sections. The past 2 months has involved a lot of web development. I have pretty much no experience in this department. Most of the web development revolved around simplifying and tidying up the old website as many […]
Once again, another major change; I’m back in Australia. Unfortunately, due to COVID-19 I had to return home. I am currently on day 8 of 14 days in quarantine. Two weeks ago, everything rapidly began to change. WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic and countries began closing their borders as the virus spread rapidly and many people were dying. Norway first closed their borders to all non-Scandinavian countries then soon after closed it borders to everyone. Schools, fitness centres and sports and recreational events, were all closed overnight. UNIS initially said they were closing for 2 weeks. Over the next week […]
It is currently a beautiful time in the Arctic. The sky is bursting with pastel colours as it transitions from the polar night to the midnight sun. Each day the sun rays light up the surrounding mountains a little more as the sun hangs above the horizon for a little longer. However unfortunately, due to my lack of Norwegian (absolutely nothing) I have swapped internships. I had to leave the Longyearbyen local government and have now started a new internship at bioCEED. I’m a little disappointed that I will not be able to continue to work on improving reuse in […]
I’m closing in on the actual end of my internship, and the last ~2 weeks I’ve been working on various projects. First, as explained in the previous blog, me and Tina from bioCEED have been creating a plant family classification game, that hopefully can be used to better teach students the difference between the plant families we have here in Svalbard. To explain the game briefly, we have made several cards that contain a trait and a picture illustrating that trait (see top picture). The traits are divided into a flower, leaf, stem or general trait. Then, using these trait-cards, […]
While I haven’t had many internship days since the last blog, I was lucky enough to join Ørjan the UNIS student representative down to Bergen where DIKU had arranged a convention. There, bioCEED and the other centers around Norway that works towards improving education met up to drink coffee and eat good food. And to learn something too, probably. Short summery of the convention It kicked-off with Harald Nybølet who is the director of DIKU, he was followed by a presentation about Erasmus+. Then, after a couple of coffee breaks, we went over to presentations by the different centers. This […]
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 […]
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 […]