Greetings!
I decided to start this blog off as a side project to my main ‘Look what I’m doing, this is so cool!’ blog, so I could focus more on diving and marine-biology related stuff!
Firstly, the basics about me.
Diving: I first qualified through PADI for my Open Water in 2012 through my local Dive centre ‘DiveMachine’ in Tonbridge. I figured I should get qualified in preparation for Uni, since I wanted to do something marine, but after qualifying that I didn’t really do much diving at all – I didn’t have the kit, there was no where close that I could easily get to and it was expensive both time wise and money wise. However on moving to Cornwall for uni I joined the dive soc which put me in contact with Dive Newquay and I decided to continue my education. From there it kinda spiralled out of control. Over the course of two years I got specialisms in:
Dry suit diving
Night and limited visibility diving
Nitrox diving
Search and Recovery diving
Deep diving
Navigation diving
I also did my React Right first aid and my Diver Stress and Rescue course. So that’s now 7/8 specialisms! Next stop, dive master!
Marine Biology related: I have been fascinated by the sea since I was tiny and I have always been a total water baby, so it has always been a dream of mine to dive (check) and become a marine biologist.
I have not always been entirely certain which bit of marine science I wanted to go into, some degrees seemed to based around geography, physics or chemistry, and that wasn’t what I wanted to do, I liked (back then) whales and dolphins and all things pretty. So I decided that for uni I would study zoology, as that was what I was interested in, but it would also give me a wider scope by looking at land animals and birds – perhaps this stuff would interest me too?
Not so much.
Zoology has definitely shown me that I want to carry on studying zoology, mostly focusing on ecology or behaviour, and that I prefer whole-organism biology over genetics or evolution, but my heart is still set on the stuff that swims. Yes land animals are cool, but they haven’t won me over, so it looks like my childhood ambition is going to carry me right through until I (hopefully) get a job.
The plan at the moment is to try and do a post grad masters degree in marine biology, so I can actually qualify and then get a job or an internship for a few years before maybe going on to do a PhD. I don’t know what I’m going to do yet, all I know is that I want to specialise in marine zoology and then we’ll go from there. If I could land a research job with sharks, cetaceans or reef behaviour/ecology I would be a very happy bunny, but we’ll just have to see where the world takes me!