Sea Watch Foundation offers an excellent opportunity for up and coming marine scientists to gain valuable work experience with marine mammals. Sea Watch encourages GCSE level students to spend a week alongside our research interns collecting data from land and vessel based surveys and assisting with data input. This year Ethan Kitchen joined us for a week in May, below he describes his experience.
Hello, I’m Ethan Kitchen, I am 15 years old and I came to Sea Watch foundation for my work experience, I have done a lot of fantastic stuff this past week like land watches and casual surveys both 1 hour and 2 hour, I also helped make the whale rope by putting new laminated information sheets on the rope to help for public awareness and a line transect survey! I also helped laminate some papers for the charity pots which helps the organization. I have enjoyed every bit of this work experience and wish I could stay longer!
One of the main things I did during my week was the line transect survey, I woke up at 5:50 and was at the pier by 6:20 to be on the boat for 6:30, we spent 9 hours on the boat all together finding lots of dolphins, the weather was quite foggy but still easy to spot the dolphins. On the boat, I did various jobs like recording environmental data every 15 minutes and looking out for dolphins with binoculars and primary observing. We got off the boat at about 3 pm and I got back to the office and cleaned the binocular lenses.
This work experience will help me in the future as the job I would like to do is marine biology which includes some of the stuff I did here! This work experience has really made me want to thrive on to getting the grades I need for the job I want to do.
