Work experience is a great way for students to gain first hand, practical experience in the workplace. Here’s a personal account of a student’s week spent in our busy ecological consultancy, giving him a taste of various surveys and desk-based work.
By Reuben, Year 10
From the 12 June, I have been gaining work experience at MKA Ecology. It has been an eye-opening experience into the day-to-day working lives of ecologists. In addition, it has been an exciting opportunity to participate in ecological surveys across East Anglia focusing on a wide variety of species from great crested newts to bats and birds. Some of the surveys I particularly enjoyed included the bat activity survey, which involved walking around a site and seeing what bats we could see and hear. I learned a lot about what different species’ echolocations look like as a sonogram, and how the echolocation used by the bats changes depending on their environment.
As well as all the fieldwork I also participated in lots of desk-based work including analysing breeding bird survey data, and reviewing bat emergence footage. Although this style of work is very different to the fieldwork it was very useful experience to find out how the office environment works as this was completely new to me, and very informative.
This placement was also good experience as I got to work with people who shared similar interests. One of the main features of this work that I still need to get used to are the hours as I wasn’t used to regularly arriving at home in the early hours of the morning, or leaving before sunrise!
In conclusion it was a very exciting and interesting placement that has made me realise it could be an area I’d be interested in working in in the future!
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