I’m not an apprentice any more. What that makes me, I’m not entirely certain. The ultimate goal of an apprentice is to become master of their craft. In the olden days an apprentice would have to serve at least 7 years before they were permitted to practise their trade, and then they would be required to prepare a masterpiece for guild approval before they could be called masters. There is a long way to go before I achieve any comparable status with the scientific community, but I do feel like I now have something to offer that community during this journeyman phase of my career.
My apprenticeship has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. It has focussed me on a career in freshwater biology and given me the skills and knowledge necessary to make that happen. I have nothing but gratitude for those who’ve helped me along the way. My various mentors, supervisors and colleagues (who I’m not going to try to list here for fear of missing somebody out) have been inspirational and I owe them a great deal. What comes next is up to me.
If you read my last blog back in March you may remember that I’d secured funding to study the effects of climate change on the upland summer mayfly. This will keep me in work until October. So far the project has thrown up a lot more questions than answers, which I suppose is exactly the way it should be at this early stage. We have completed all of the fieldwork that we had initially planned (which isn’t to say there won’t be more). This has taken me to some pretty beautiful locations across the UK; Snowdonia, North Yorkshire, the Southern Uplands, the Cairngorms and Caithness to name a few. Our work is certainly providing some very useful information about the current distribution of the upland summer mayfly, and the next stage is to look at this and see if there is any suggestion that this distribution has been changing over time. Whatever our results show it will take a lot more work to confirm any change, so I hope that this is just the beginning of work on this species, which could teach us a lot about the responses of our upland watercourses to a changing climate. It’s exciting how much more work could be done on the subject, but naturally it all relies on being able to afford to do it.
So I have nothing lined up yet beyond October. I’ve applied for a couple of PhDs, and I got as far as being interviewed for one of these on Monday. I didn’t get the position but it’s encouraging to get that far and the experience is useful. At least I know what I need to work on for next time. A PhD is really what I want to do next, I feel ready to take on a major piece of work of that nature. It appeals to me as a focus for the skills developed in my apprenticeship. It would be a contribution made to the wider scientific community, and a chance to focus on a specific piece of research and create something significant. A masterpiece if you like.
Thanks for everything Natural Talent, I’ll be in touch!
– Louis Kitchen (Riverfly Journeyman)