It is a strange time to start a new job. Yet, it is a testament to my very friendly and organised new colleagues that I feel warmly welcome and excited about the work, despite not yet having taken a seat – literally – in the office.
Fortunately, my last 18 months working as a freelancer helped me prepare for the current situation. This included six months living fairly isolated halfway up a mountain in Southern Spain, producing creative content for organisations thousands of miles away, like the Natural History Museum in London and Wildlife Trusts.
What is so welcome now however, is to be part of a team again and working on projects closer to home – swapping an office halfway up the Sierra Nevada for one halfway up the Skirrid. Furthermore, although producing content such as the ‘Jurassic Sea Adventure Guide’ and ‘Insect Career Quiz’ was a blast, I am looking forward to working on more tangible, research-based projects again – a return towards my science background.
My career as a ‘pure’ scientist was fairly short-lived. It culminated in some fieldwork in Greece, which involved being surrounded by an angry mob of Golden Jackals in an olive grove and being questioned at distance by a Greek policeman with a megaphone. Fortunately, this was all smoothed over when it became apparent I was merely an embarrassed, over-enthusiastic ecologist, rather than a felon. But it marked the moment I changed tact away from science research towards science communication.
Since then I have worked for various charities and scientific institutes, including the Royal Society of Biology, Bat Conservation Trust and Natural History Museum, and I’ve had the pleasure of meeting and working with many exciting people and organisations, including the teams from Blue Planet II and Seven Worlds One Planet, the main man David Attenborough himself, as well as researchers across all sorts of environmental and natural history disciplines. It was my job to find ways to best engage audiences with their most compelling and important stories and work. This involved video, theatre, live events, a lot of talking and writing, and even a bit of music.
After nearly a decade in London however, the city’s charms began to wane. So far, swapping South East London for South East Wales has felt like absolutely the right move. So too does starting at Miller Research, which feels like a chance to utilise the communication skills I have developed over my career, re-discover my analytical chops, branch out into further areas of interest, and learn more about the social and economic research sector and the exciting projects taking place across Wales and further afield.
Who knows, one day I might even make it into the office!
