When I hire entry level people for marine research jobs in the lab, I look for some basic qualities that (maybe surprisingly) have little to do with scientific knowledge: attention to detail, the ability to perform the same task over and over at a high level of competence, eagerness, and a team player mentality.
I also look for people who don’t need much sleep. If you can function intellectually despite being on deck twenty hours, your marine biologist career is off to a great start!
Though the lab is land-based for the most part, our staff is out on the water for a few weeks every year. So when I evaluate job applicants, I look for people who are able to work hard physically and mentally in some pretty awful conditions—like on a research boat in freezing weather when the deck is bouncing all around, lab stools are flying, and everyone is seasick. I need people who can handle all that, as well as look through a microscope, keep careful track of various data, and figure out our location on a chart.
I look for people who think fun is getting mud and rust all over themselves and their wardrobes. People who don’t worry about fish spines or oysters poking holes in their foul weather gear or mind bruises from banging into the steel bits that stick out all over big fishing boats.
And that’s the fun part of fieldwork!
After I finished my undergraduate degree, I took any entry level position I could get as long as it involved marine work. I was flexible in my requirements for location, salary, and type of work, which really paid off in once-in-a-lifetime opportunities. I called myself “the itinerant technician” and worked in many places on many projects. Some were exotic and Cousteau-like, but all shared some basic requirements: love your job no matter how tedious and be flexible and reliable so you won’t lack for work (marine research is a tightly knit field).
As a lowest-level employee, I lived on research vessels in many oceans, went down on the Alvin submersible (and others), traveled to the Antarctic aboard an icebreaker, SCUBA dived every day in the tropics (for work!), and enjoyed many other exciting opportunities. On the other hand, I spent countless hours doing the world’s most tedious work: weighing a thousand filters to the nearest milligram and picking through endless liters of plankton samples. I never made a lot of money. This is a field you enter for the love of it, not the income.
Field researcher Kathryn Ashton-Alcox has over twenty years of experience in laboratory and field projects spanning the disciplines of marine biology and ecology, aquaculture, cellular, and molecular biology. She has worked in many different regions including the East Coast, the Great Lakes, Antarctica, and the Caribbean.