[Music] Do you have a talent for observing nature? Do you enjoy studying organisms and ecosystems? Do you like doing field and lab experiments? Then you may find a career as a biologist to be a great "environment" for you. Biologists study living organisms in ecosystems to manage natural resources. They work in diverse fields, such as aquatic biology, marine biology, botany, environmental impact assessment, microbiology, land reclamation and remediation, wildlife management, and zoology. To obse
rve the natural habitat of this career, we spoke to a biologist working in Alberta. [Music] Hi, I'm Alex, and I'm a biologist. A biologist is someone who answers the question of what is life? And where does life come from? And how does life work? Biology is a pretty broad, broad category that encompasses everything from the processes that happen within cells, and then the processes that happen within populations and species, and over large amounts of geological time. As far back as I can remembe
r, I was turning over rocks and looking for critters, and when I was a little bit older, when I was in elementary school, I would be writing notes about observations of animals that I saw in my backyard and in the neighbourhood. And so, I always have been a naturalist in a lot of ways. If you're really interested in biology, and you get a undergraduate degree in biology, you can then go and get a PhD or a master's degree in biology as well. And if you if you get a PhD in biology and you know you
want to do research or teaching at a university someday, you could be a professor. That's the academic pathway. There are lots of other potential jobs that you can have. There's lots of industry positions in agriculture and biotechnology, where you would be either working in a laboratory or you'd be working doing data analysis as a big part of the job. You could be out camping in the desert or in the rainforest. Lots of different rugged terrain that you could be navigating. And so there's an ad
venture element to being a biologist as well. In order to call yourself a professional biologist, you have to be registered with the Alberta Society of Professional Biologists. In the winter time, my job is pretty straightforward: I generally catch up on emails, is the first thing I do. After that, I'll do some writing. And then, uh, I will go into the lab, generally, and I will do some lab work. Dissections is a big part of what I do. I dissect honeybees. I extract the RNA out of the bees and t
hen we then we quantify the amount of RNA for particular genes. It's our way of looking at how a particular gene is expressed in the bee. We wear lab coats, we wear gloves, we always wear closed-toed shoes, we have safety goggles and pants in the laboratory because there's sharp objects and there's chemicals. In the summer, that's our field season, we call it. That's when our honeybees are active, which are stinging insects. So, the personal protective equipment we use is usually something over
our face: a veil. I'd say our core responsibility is to uphold the values and ethics of being an accurate scientist and a true scientist. And then, the next sort of layer of responsibility is to disseminate your findings to the public. And if what you're studying is something complicated and hard to understand for non-experts, part of your job is finding out how to communicate that to laypeople in a way that they can understand, that they don't need to have all this background knowledge and unde
rstand all the jargon in order to understand what's going on. "This is a really undeveloped one, this one's much more developed." It's important to have a lot of different tools in your toolbox as a biologist. Effective communication, you have to be sort of statistically-minded and mathematically-minded in ways, having fine motor skills is good, it's good to be able to use your fingers and make
small fine movements. You have to be interested in inquiry. You have to have a mind that is open to n
ew ideas. You have to have a creativity. You have to come up with interesting questions, but then you also have to come up with effective ways to answer those questions. Questions about life. Fundamental questions about how life operates. The most satisfying part about being a biologist is that I get to ask weird questions and then I get to answer them. And I get to actually work on ways to solve those bizarre questions. And it really being sort of surprising that someone's going to then pay you
to do it. Biologists have an inquisitive nature and are good at keeping accurate records. They also have a head for math and statistics. If you're open-minded, good at synthesizing data, and love the outdoors, research, and problem-solving, then a career as a biologist may be in your "nature." Synthesize the details of this career, including training requirements and salary ranges, by going to the occupational profile on the alis website. While you're there, check out some "biodiverse" occupati
ons, including agrologist, biochemist, and biotechnologist. Explore the possibilities! Go to alis.alberta.ca.
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