| Guybrush |
12-31-2008 05:09 AM |
Quote:
Originally Posted by Seltzer
(Post 571163)
Hey tore
I'm helping my brother choose his major and papers for uni this year and we've decided on a BSc specialising in ecology (specifically marine ecology) which consists of many ecology related and general biology papers, 2 environmental science papers, 2 marine science papers, a statistics paper, a biometry paper, a geography paper and maybe some geology papers.
So instead of doing a BSc majoring in biology and simply choosing marine/ecology related papers, he's opting for the ecology specialisation. The downside of this is that with all the extra non-bio papers, he won't have room to fit in any of the microbio/chem/biochem/cellular bio papers that are on offer in first year.
I never did biology at school (I was a chem/physics/calc/languages guy) so I can offer him little insight. I'm just wondering if there's much demand for ecologists and whether he'd be severely limiting himself by sticking to whole organism biology?
edit: maybe this should have been a PM :D
|
Ugh, that is a hard question. My education has been very all-round, but I ended up focusing on ecology. In Norway, there are jobs, but I haven't seen much interest for ecologists in the private market. The jobs are often at universities or other research institutes or some government job regarding resource management.
I think statistics is very important and while you can learn it on your own, getting it in your education will be very helpful. Learning about the environment in general, wether it is wind currents, water currents, sedimentation around river estuaries or the physics on how fur or fat can insulate against the cold is important, but of course biologists get away with knowing less about this than meteorologists, physicists, geologists and oceanographers do. As a result, it should be possible to learn what you need from these fields in the future in your spare time. I was fortunate to get a bit of everything, but if I had to choose, I would probably get more into molecular biology and physiology. There are many hard (and boring) topics there and so it may be a good idea to learn those in a "school setting".
Biology starts at the molecular level, so it's a good basis. It does open more doors and genetics are getting very important. For example, ecologists compare genetics between different creatures all the time.
So, those are my two kroners. :) |
