MSc Conservation Biology - Costa Rice Fieldtrip video transcript

James: Hi, my name is James. I am a student on the MSC Conservation Biology course. We're currently here in Costa Rica on our fieldtrip. This field trip is a compulsory part of the course, which is amazing because it means everyone gets to go. Right here we are basically trying to do our own little bit of research in the area that we're interested in. So in the forest so far we have been very very lucky.

For the more entomology interested students we've found a lot of bugs, a lot of ants, fire ants, soldier ants, I think about five or six species. We've also been extremely lucky we've seen spider monkeys just let you down the road. We've seen capuchins and also last night we were very, very lucky we managed to see a sloth first off crossing the road just outside the station we're staying at and also then in the trees and we were about literally about a couple of meters away from it, so that was a big highlight of the trip so far.

Kirk: My undergraduate degree in Zoology really gave me the skills to help people learn and identify the invertebrates that we find here. They consider that potentially 80% of Costa Rica's invertebrates are undescribed, which makes it really exciting.

James: So the aim of the trip is to kind of put into practice the stuff we've learned in theory on this course so far we've done a lot of stuff about principles and now we're getting to do practical's. Mainly we just wanted to come out here into an incredible environment to do it and this is a incredible place and it gives potentially some of us a preview of where we could be working in the future if we're lucky enough. With us doing a little research project here it it's just a really great introduction for us into the world of research in an environment that's very different to where we're used to in the UK. So I decided to study this course at the University of Derby predominantly due to this amazing fieldtrip that we do. We also have lots of great services at the University of Derby, so I work in the Aquatic Research Facility working on Coral restoration and the course itself is just a very in-depth and also varied aspects of conservation biology.

Kirk: The skills that I gained during the Zoology course really helped me expand my network. It created opportunities for me such as, the one here in Costa Rica and also paid opportunities with the Oxford University Museum. The Conservation Biology masters is a fantastic course purely because the teaching staff are absolutely fantastic. They support you every step of the way to graduation but also they have a wider range of expertise from coral reefs, mushrooms, primates, plants and anything else you can imagine. In the future I would absolutely love to attend more exotic journeys such as this, continue my scientific journey, and perhaps be featured in a magazine such as Natural Geographic, and maybe at a push describe a species or two.

MSc Conservation Biology - Costa Rice Fieldtrip video

Back to How you will learn