How to study is one thing, but what to study for is a completely different matter. In order to enlighten students about future job opportunities, bioCEED organized a career seminar at UNIS on the 20th of May 2022. To represent a wide range of career options, three speakers were invited: Jannike Wika, currently employed at Sysselmesteren in Svalbard, Stuart Thomson, the current lab technician at UNIS and Janne Søreide, a professor in Arctic Marine Biology – Ecology. All three speakers told the students about their work lives, daily joys, and struggles, and how they reached their current positions. The students were very interested and asked questions until the time was over for all the speakers. The presentations were all in all very well received by students that showed great interest in the subject matter. Their interest shows the importance of seminars such as this one. A special thanks goes from us in bioCEED to Jannike Wika, Stuart Thomson and Janne Søreide, who made this seminar possible.
To ask the students themselves how they envision their future in terms of jobs, we ended the seminar with a short survey. In the following, we briefly present the results: To the question whether they already know what they would like to do in the future, the largest group (33.3 %) answered “I have an idea”. 22.2 % said they knew what they wanted to do in the future, they might know, or they absolutely don’t know. We also asked, in which career direction they would like to go. You can see the results here:
Students also reported that the most important aspects of future career are safety, enjoyable work, a good work / life balance, a nice community, sufficient payment – as well as working in and for nature. Their greatest concern is for their career to be deprived of these things.
All in all, the students showed huge interest in this seminar, precisely because most of them are not sure what direction they would like to take.