Welcome everyone to the Alaska SeaLife Center!
My name is Darin and today we're gonna hear from
Dr. Amy Bishop. She's gonna tell us a little bit about
how she came to this particular career
as a marine researcher. So, sort of following along
on our little series of how each of us
made it along our career paths.
So, let me go ahead and
introduce Amy here.
Amy, thanks for joining us
today and I'm gonna go ahead and
make myself disappear.
[Amy] Alright, thanks Darin!
Alright, thanks everybody for joining again!
If you've been tuning in over the last couple of weeks
you might have seen me presenting on some of the research
that I do here at the SeaLife Center.
But today I wanted to take a little bit, like Darin said,
and just answer a question that I get asked quite a bit
and the center's scientists get asked quite a bit,
how did we get these jobs? Marine biology
is one of those careers that I think a lot of people are drawn to when they're young
and for whatever reason pick different
career paths along the way so people
who are really excited about the ocean and really want to pursue this as a
career path I wanted to kind of give you a little glimpse
into what my path looked like. But as
you can see on the screen, quick spoiler alert, there is no
right answer to this. What I'm gonna talk to you about today is kind of my journey
and the steps that I took and there's going to be some overall
themes that hopefully will be helpful for you if you are considering
this as a career path.
But, just know that there really is no right answer to this
and I have friends who ended up in marine research who
started off in completely
different career paths, different types of research
and so hopefully you find something in here that inspires you
if this is something that you're interested in.
So, just as a quick recap about
where I am right now to kind of give you the end of the story,
I am primarily a behavioral ecologist, so I
study animal's behaviors and how they're adapted to their environment
and so for me that's why marine biology is really exciting
because you have these creatures that are adapted to live in this really
really unique sometimes harsh environment and
 
So the questions that I like to answer are things like
what space is important for animals
and how does that relate to our conservation and management of those animals?
How are they interacting with each other in that space?
How resilient are they to change? That's one of the big questions that's really interesting
to me and many researchers right now
as we face all of these rapid environmental changes brought on by
climate change and human activities.
And kind of along the lines of that is how can humans and animals
coexist in these environments?
How can we find management solutions that find
that balance between protecting and resource use?
So, these are some of the systems ans species that I've worked with
over the years or am currently working with and you see a lot of
big marine megafauna there. So I do primarily
research
top predators in marine ecosystems
because they're great sentinel species, they help us know what's going on
within that environment
and there's also a lot of interesting links that they have
then to understand kind of these ecosystem wide changes.
But, let's dial it back now to the beginning
of the story back in high school
we're all feeling that pressure of what am i going to do with my life
and at the time one of the things that if you
talked to someone I went to middle school with
the thing that they would probably tell you was clearly defining about me
back in those days
was that I loved dolphins. I couldn't get enough of dolphins.
I was growing up in Chicago
in the mid-west.
I had never seen the ocean but I had seen plenty of documentaries
and stories and pictures
of dolphins and something about them just really fascinated me.
Their ability to, again,
live in the marine environment but be mammals, so they need to breathe air,
their sociality, how they communicated, everything about them fascinated me.
So, for a long time I really was thinking
that marine biology that's the career that I definitely
want to do so I wanna learn more about this species.
But, at the same time, I also had a huge interest in
a lot of creative endeavors, primarily
art and music and so there also was this
kind of idea in my head that maybe I wanna go be an animator
maybe I'd like to work for something like Disney or Pixar.
As I went through middle school and high school, I started finding
those science classes were really resonating with me. I really enjoyed learning
about new concepts and learning about ecosystems
and about animals and even some of the molecular stuff was interesting to me.
So, ultimately, I decided that
art was going to be a little bit more of a hobby for the time being
and I was going to put most of my effort into understanding science.
And that is kind of one of the core things about being a marine biologist,
you are a biologist, first and foremost.
So, it is really important to get that core scientific background
if marine biology is something that is interesting to you.
Now, I did this in a series of
schooling opportunities, I guess for
lack of a better word, my education went
across many states, countries, and different ecosystems
and the courses that I took though I had that passion
for kind of marine biology as itself,
I really tried to take a step back in early years.
Awesome advice from a high school teacher actually who,
knowing my interest in marine biology, cautioned me not to get
too specific too quickly,
to keep my interests broad because you never know
where your life may take you. You may not even know
what opportunities are available, or what information
might interest you if you narrow your field too early.
So, that's one of those other broad tips that I would say if you have the opportunity
to remain broad and kind of keep that
overarching perspective, it really can help you
even on your path if you're pretty sure you want to end up in marine biology.
So, for my undergrad I went to Northern Michigan University
and studied zoology so a more broad approach at looking at
animals and how they relate to their ecosystems
and then from that, I started realizing that there were a lot more
of my interests that weren't just in core biology but
in conservation and management. I really wanted to know how we
can answer some of those questions I started with
about these interactions between animals and their environment,
how we can maybe move forward to having adaptive management strategies.
And so that led me to doing a master's degree through
Duke University and that was a coastal environmental management program
and so that program actually was a huge step to the left for me
and I ended up taking in politics, economics,
management,
all these things that really I never thought as a marine biologist
would be really important for me to understand.
But that
overarching, well-rounded
opportunity, in addition to taking corses
with leading experts in marine ecology and marine mammals really gave me
a better idea of that picture for conservation and management
and how maybe all of these components of the ecosystem, including
the human components,
all fit together.
Then, an opportunity more or less fell in my lap that
I saw there was a PhD
research position being advertised
at Durham University in the UK
and not thinking much about it, didn't think I was
entirely competitive because I had just finished my master's
I applied and low and behold was accepted into the program.
So, I picked up my life and moved across the pond and
stayed there for about four years studying the behavioral ecology
of grey seals.
And again, this was kind of a step back into more of that
pure marine biology type questions. I was interested in
how male breeding systems work and what kind
of behaviors they interact with each other within their environment.
But there were still of those bigger conservation management
questions in terms of we saw
rapidly changing
environmental conditions
and the site that we were working at was
both exposed to tourism, people could go and watch the seals,
and there was also military activities in the area.
So understanding how those two activities were impacting
the animals was a big part of my studies.
And then following that,
I came back to the US and to Alaska and did a
post-doctoral position at the University of Alaska in Anchorage
working with
Alaskan native subsistance hunters
to find ways that we can collect biological samples from
harbor seals to better understand what was going on in the marine environment.
So just in that
snapshot of the educational opportunities I had you can
see that there is a pretty
broad and changing
 
focus of my interests.
So another good point and tip if you want to be
a marine biologist, a lot of my focus was
on those upper trophic levels initially,
but along the way,
it's ok to change to change your mind and find new avenues that are interesting
and new opportunities and as far as noting that
even along the way, you know not all of my experiences were
with those big charismatic animals.
I spent a semester
studying in a wetland center where I was doing a lot with soil and plants
restoring creek bed.
So really all of those opportunities along the way are part of your
journey and to really embrace the opportunities that you have.
Another big take away that links back to that
duality that i had when I was in high school is I found that
when you're trying to be a scientist, particularly
a marine scientist, because you are working with this environment
that's not just unique for the animals but it is challenging to work in,
having that creativity as part of your
approach to problem solving
is hugely important. So don't think of it as I have to
pick the right brain or left brain part of my interests.
Really embrace and find that
at it's core creativity is learning to observe,
understanding those components, and then creatively
putting them back together in new forms.
You can apply that to music, you can apply that to poetry,
or you could apply it to solving or generating
new ideas of how to approach scientific questions.
And this is something that I've been pretty passionate about
and try to find other organizations throughout my time that
also embrace this.
One of them that I wanted to highlight here, if you haven't heard
of the program called Inspiring Girls Expeditions, it's a great
program that takes 16 and 17 year old girls from around
the globe and takes them out into the backcountry
for 9-14 days and gives them
an opportunity to conduct science,
explore wilderness, and also use those
observational and creative skills. So a big core part of this
program is encouraging the girls to
use art as a way to both observe their natural environment
to come up with hypotheses
to find those critical
analysis skills that are so important for science
but can also manifest in that creative side of the world.
So, if you're in high school right now watching this
and you're thinking that this might be something you might want to do,
I encourage you to check out Inspiring Girls Expeditions because it is a life changing experience.
and I'm very happy and proud
to be part
of that organization.
Kind of eluded to this before, but I think a lot of people that get into
marine biology do get very hyper-focused on
particularly a species. I certainly did early on
with my interest in dolphins,
but don't let that focus deter you from taking
opportunities to learn new skills, new
ideas, to be exposed to new
ways of thinking about things and new
systems that maybe you wouldn't have thought were that interesting to you.
So again, for example, even when I was here
for the first time in Seward, I actually came through the internship program
that the Alaska SeaLife Center offers while I was an undergrad
and I was studying harbor seals in glacier fjords,
but I volunteered with opportunities that I could in town.
So, this was me at the fish cleaning station, collecting halibut stomachs
for a broader study. It was dirty, it was gross, little bit
on the smelly side if you don't like the smell of fish. I don't terribly mind it.
It definitely didn't have with where I thought I saw my career going,
but it was something that really exposed me to
a lot of different opportunities. It was thinking about our ecosystems
not just from the top charismatic animals
that you see at the surface but what else is going on beneath
the ocean. How are they all interconnected? What are these eating that are important to
other fish? It also gives you skills
and ways to observe and learn form the broader scientific
network. So, a lot of the skills that you'll do in the
early on of your career
is professional counter and professional bag holder.
You might be collecting samples for other graduate students
or for other researchers. Don't think of that as
busy work, but as really an opportunity for you to
observe, to ask questions.
There's really no such thing as
too small of a role in a research project.
And that really brings me to the next point which is
team work.
Everything about science is team work.
I remember on the first day of my Ph.D orientation
the dean of the college said
gear up for the next four years of your life, it's going to be the most lonely you'll ever be.
And, I never really felt that during my Ph.D because so much of
my research relied on my lab
being a community and my department being a community
and us working together in the field or in the lab.
And those kind of skills you can develop
not just with scientific opportunities. So again,
I didn't see the ocean until I was 20 but
I was still developing and honing some of these skills through other opportunities.
So I was very active with the American Cancer Society's
Relay for Life in undergrad and working on that
development team, working with some of the teams
themselves that were walking and participating in the fundraiser
working with the planning committee, working with the
broader university and the local community,
all of those different abilities of communicating and
being patient and listening, those are skills
that you can pick up in a lot
of different ways that aren't just for science
but then apply it to science. So that's something that if you
are looking for that foot in the door
in your first scientific opportunity and you've had these other opportunities
in the past to really make sure that you highlight that when you're
applying for these positions that you have some of those core skills
even if it hasn't been in a proper research environment yet.
And lastly, the big thing is that nobody is where they are
at the point of their career without having people that helped
them along the way.
I can't speak strongly enough for how
much I value all of the mentors that I've had.
Going all the way back to that high school teacher
who encouraged me to stay broad,
my internship mentors, my educational mentors,
and particularly a lot of just
my fellow classmates and fellow
researchers along the way. Your mentors don't have to
just be the big bigs and the
senior scientists but it can be the people you're on the journey
with. They're providing you guidance and providing you
information that's helping you become who
you wanna be as part of this career path.
And so I just want to make sure that
personally, I say a big thank you to everybody I've worked with
but to encourage you to surround yourself with people that
are passionate about helping you find your path.
Not necessarily telling you what your path has to be,
but helping you really find that path, find your center,
and hopefully, you find yourself
where you want to be.
For me, I have found myself where I want to be.
I'm very lucky.
A lot of it was hard work. It was
a lot of blood, sweat, and tears, a lot of moving.
I have, like I said, lived in a lot of different states and countries
so getting home and seeing my family is rare, but
that's not the story for everyone.
And that first day that I did see the ocean and
set off in a boat to go look for dolphins and  Scottish coastline
I sat there and
I thought I would be pretty
darn happy if I could do this for a job and so I consider myself
pretty lucky that I am here.
I'm able to continue answering the questions that are interesting to me,
I can use the creative part of my brain and what gets
me excited is part of my job,
and that I can help mentor the next generation through
our internship program and through graduate students.
So,
that's pretty much my career journey in a nutshell.
I did want to say that I'm very happy to talk to anyone.
If you have any specific questions
about undergraduate or grad school or just the career path in general,
you can find my contact information of the
SeaLife Center's website or you can contact me through
the blog or through the comments here.
Thanks for listening!
Darin's gonna do a little send off
[Darin] Thanks Amy! That was super inspirational
for our
especially
secondary school
audience.
Folks who are really getting pretty close to starting to make some real decisions about
 
the kind of career they would like to pursue.
The advise of
getting too specific too quickly
is exactly what helped me in my career path.
 
So I wholeheartedly support that.
 
But,
again, just allows you to open up and find all those other opportunities.
I would definitely encourage everyone to
check out our 60 Degrees North science blog.
the link to that blog is in the description of this video
 
and if you go to the Alaska SeaLife Center website you'll find it via that as well under the science tab.
Amy curates that blog and has some fantastic information and
what everybody really loves just loads of amazing pictures.
So, thanks again Amy for everything!
 
