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My career aspirations in school changed quite a lot. I generally wanted to be a vet, an archaeologist and a meteorologist. Towards the end of school, I settled on becoming a vet.
Fortunately for me, I didn’t get the grades I needed for vet school. That meant I had to re-think my career options, which took quite a while, but I ended up becoming an evolutionary biologist. Evolutionary biology, funnily enough, combines a lot of the things that I liked about meteorology and archaeology, like looking for patterns in data. Plus, I get to work with loads of different animals, and my research helps us to learn more about them and can even help conservation.
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My route to becoming an evolutionary biologist wasn’t straightforward, I started out studying marine zoology at university but after a year of not feeling very enthusiastic about it, I switched to animal behaviour. The change was exactly what I wanted, the focus was not on a particular group of animals, but how all animals behave and how animal behaviour evolves.
After my degree I did a masters, I studied monkeys in Nigeria and Nambia. Around this time I realised as much as I loved watching monkeys, what I loved more was finding out the answers to questions. I worked out that the research projects I had enjoyed the most were the ones where I really wanted to find why or how animals evolved in a certain way. I didn’t need to fly all the way to exotic places to study amazing animals and how they evolved, I could do it anywhere.
Now I study bees in the UK and I am trying to find out what makes queen bees act like queens, and what makes workers bees act like workers.
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This article was written by Dr Rebecca Boulton, Postdoctoral research fellow.
Follow Becky on Twitter: @DrBecky_B