Fieldnotes of an Arachnophobe
I've been trying to improve my CV for a while now, which means getting experience in a range of areas. Part of this meant fieldwork experience. One of my friends, for example, spent a year in South America helping a group of scientists - I forget doing what exactly. My point is, as I was, I had no chance of competing against people with this sort of experience. The difficulty here is that there's no way I could ever afford to do that, even to travel to another part of the country for a bit. If I wanted experience, I had to stay local. Doing what any broke student would do, I sent a somewhat desperate email to my academic advisor basically begging for some work I could do. That's how I ended up helping with a project studying ground beetle behaviour. I usually wake up around eight or nine, pretty good for a student I think, but I had to be on campus at nine. This meant leaving at half eight so getting up at half six. I was absolutely terrified that first morning, being the l