Whilst my supervisor named Stuart left on a week’s vacation, I quickly start to get introduced as“the new (mini) Stuart” by the biology department staff to the new arrivals. Since it feels likeStuart is the glue that keeps the department together I am honoured to carry this title for theweek. Before his departure he trained me in DNA extraction, PCR, and gel electrophoresis, to beable to distinguish between two different species of copepods, a project formerly worked on bya PhD student who is currently on a scientific cruise. I was thankful to be given so muchconfidence and trust to take […]
UNIS
36 posts
Going on my second month in Longyearbyen I have now started to know my way around the surrounding area; the closest mountain tops; the neighbouring valleys; and two of the adjacent glaciers. It is truly amazing to live in what looks like a postcard. I am also starting to get to know pupils and staff at Longyearbyen school. I spent my two first weeks as an intern with the first graders, following their project about animal wildlife on Svalbard. I have also been on a ski trip to Bjørndalen with the sixth form students, where I got to talk a […]
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 […]
The past few weeks after UNIS closed down can be characterised by confusion, waiting for information and lack of efficiency. Students were constantly discussing what to do with their studies, if they were going to be forced to leave Longyearbyen and where to go. For around 10 days, which felt like 2 months, the insecurity among the students grew along with the alcohol consumption and lack of motivation. With the increased pressure from UNIS and some home universities, most students had left by Sunday the 22nd of March. I have many reasons why I wanted to stay. First and the […]
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 […]
My name is Sine, and this semester I will be living in Longyearbyen, studying Arctic Biology at Svalbard University Center (UNIS). Just arriving in Longyearbyen, I am really surprised how much I like the complete darkness, and I feel amazed by even the smallest signs of light on the sky that highlights the surrounding mountains. Longyearbyen is really beautiful, and the arctic conditions suits me perfect. Being a person who absolutely love hiking, I am really looking forward to the spring when the arctic nature reveals itself, and the sun starts rising. My previous semesters at the University of South-Eastern […]
My internship is slowly coming to an end. There is no doubt that it has been a valuable experience, and I have gained a lot of new knowledge. When it comes to the biology, I think my main learning outcome has been in molecular biology. This is a field of biology that I didn’t really know too much about, and to be honest I never really thought it would be very relevant for me as my main interest is within terrestrial ecology. But as I’ve seen from some of the research in UNIS, being able to do molecular work opens […]
I am now done with my internship work. It is a bit sad because I have really enjoyed it. I have felt very included in the Knowledge Centre while working there. I have learned a lot and am very grateful to the personnel at SIOS for guiding me through this internship. Especially during my data management work I have utilized my biological knowledge. Both with the understanding of a data set and with working within excel. I have done work on biological data sets in excel before, so I think this have helped me understanding the data set I have […]
This is my final blog about my time at Polar Permaculture which I thoroughly enjoyed. Since I started a lot has changed, and the circle is complete as I began as a student and finished as a mentor for the new interns. We finished preparing the dome for the season and got the hole patched up, so it is now fully operational. We planted a lot of beans and moved some chillies and other plants out, hoping they will cope with their new environment. The other day temperatures almost reached 38C, so we had to make sure plants didn’t dry […]
Hi! It is now time for the last blog post for this internship period! I still have some more work hours at the school, but it is getting towards the end. Last week, we had some presentations where we tried to reflect over what we have learned this semester, and I will in this blog post try to communicate some of the thoughts we discussed, and what I think about this semester as an “teacher”. Expectations Before I started this internship, my main goal was to improve my teaching skills, learn how to work in a team, and utilise my […]
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, […]
As we agreed on our midterm appraisal talk, Stuart has lately been teaching me a little more about molecular biology. So far, I’ve been doing DNA extractions, PCR and gel electrophoresis, and making glycerol stocks of e.coli cultures. Stuart is a good teacher, and lets me do everything myself. This is a good example of how well learning by doing works. Although it is a little frustrating in the beginning when I have no clue what I am doing, Stuart has been very patient and explains everything very well. Instead of just being told what to do, I have to […]
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. […]
Hey there! The internship is soon in its final stage, and now as the month of May has just started, you can notice that the beginning of the end is here. The students at Longyearbyen school is approaching the end of this semester, and in the classrooms we are slowly starting to summarise and recap curriculum and think about the upcoming finals and exams. For the older students, the exams are approaching rapidly, and May is going to be a busy month for them. As “russetiden” has just begun, the students are balancing exams and partying, and it still impresses […]
In less than a month my semester at UNIS will come to an end. But I certainly will return. The picture above shows me standing in room one of the barrack – the place where I have been spending a lot of time to tend to our plants, such as our approximately 2m high tomato plant with its two tomatoes. Last week I held a short live presentation at UNIS about my internship, but since most of you probably were not able to attend, I will outline here what I talked about. Polar permaculture is an ambitious and challenging project. […]
It’s time for a new update, although not much new has been going on in life as a lab technician intern. I still have a very varied everyday where every day is different! Some projects are getting close to an end now, for example the epic clean-up and reorganisation of the department’s storage rooms. Although it has been a long process, it feels good to have everything in order and hopefully have made the scientist’s lives a little easier! Another project is soon getting back on track, namely the seawater nutrient analysis. The replacement part has been delivered and we […]
This last period I have not been working very much. This because of the intensive period with the conference earlier, as well as saving working hours for my block work coming up on data management in May. Lately I have mainly been reading up on the data portals I will use during this work. Then I will write biological data into a DarwinCore standard dataset model, before this dataset will be put out on the web portal GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility). DarwinCore provides a standardized way for writing datasets. The goal is that everyone will use standardized categories when […]
In my previous post I wrote about how nervous I felt about talking in front of an audience, but there was an even bigger challenge ahead when I was told we would be on live television. In fact, I was barely able to sleep the night before the ‘God Morgen Norge’ team visited us. They started shooting outside in front of the dome with Ben, who told them the story about Polar Permaculture. There was a little misunderstanding when the reporter gestured to go inside to see the lab and Ben thought she wanted him to look more towards the […]
Since I last wrote you, my internship has consisted of pretty much my usual every-day schedule at the school. I go to the school four times a week, where I participate in my regular classes. On Mondays and Tuesdays, this means helping out in the 9th grade mathematics class, and on Wednesday I usually have 8th graders in natural science before I have my little “bio-group” in the end of the day. On Thursdays I have a full day at the school, consisting of natural science with both 8th and 7th grade, In addition to SFO in the afternoon. This […]
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 […]
Life as a lab technician intern at UNIS is varied as always! Lately I have been working with the nutrient analyser, organising samples and equipment in the biology department storage rooms, done some seawater filtrations and been polar bear guarding on a field excursion with the limnology (freshwater biology) course. It’s nice to get so many different experiences and I learn a lot from utilising my biological knowledge and skills in different fields of biology. As I mentioned in the last post, there is a lot of work needed to get the nutrient analyser running. But after spending a lot […]
5th-6th of March I attended the SESS report 2018 workshop arranged by SIOS. This took place in Copenhagen. Since I had taken part in planning this, I am very happy it was a success. As I had the responsibility for the logistics, I am happy everything went fine with the hotel booking and the restaurant dinner. During this workshop I got to know many well-established researchers in the international research environment within different sorts of earth science research. For example during the dinner I sat with a researcher who just had taken part in launching two rockets from Ny-Ålesund. Through […]