Hi, my name's Sean and I studied Environmental
Science and I graduated in 2011.
So now I'm a PhD student at Oxford University
and my research is focused on the importance
of biodiversity for the function of the ecosystems
mainly based in tropical forests and temporal
grasslands. In a little more detail, what
I'm investigating is how environmental conditions
and resources impact the stable co-existence
of plant species and the consequences this
has for key consistent properties like production,
carbon sequestration and water supply.
So one of the things I benefited most from
the course I think was it's broad nature and
how it gives you a context of how different
environmental problems link with each other
so later on the course I had some more opportunity
to do some independent study and this was
a great opportunity to gain some transferable
skills like time-management that are actually
really important for any aspect of employment.
So for my dissertation in my third year, I'd
specialised by that point and found it was
a good opportunity to really focus on my specific
interests that I've found and also to develop
skills I wanted to learn. So, I did some species
distribution modelling of an invasive species
that was spreading through the UK and so this
brought together my main interest, ecology,
through the course, which I have now obviously
pursued after, and also allowed me to develop
my computational skills that I hadn't had
before at GIS which has been invaluable throughout
after.
