Since I was young I have loved the outdoors, loved camping, wandering and exploring. This was something that my parents encouraged enthusiastically with many school holidays spent driving around rural Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia. Whilst this instilled in me a great dislike for sharing the back seat of a car with my little brother it also instilled in me a fascination for natural history and the environmental diversity of our continent.

After a number of school based programs nurtured my interest in science, I became the first Australian student to be accepted into European Space Camp. Here I had the opportunity to meet up with other youths interested in space sciences and to work together to launch an actual rocket. Whilst that was an awesome experience I still wasn’t sure if Engineering was the right thing for me so I moved to Brisbane to study Science at the University of Queensland, where I stumbled upon a well-kept secret. I found out that it was possible to study the environment and human interactions with the environment under the broad title of Geography.

So, after three years of field trips and essays (whilst also worked part time as a digital map maker with a construction company) I undertook an Honours project studying floating houses and the people who live in them. Floating houses are homes that have been built to float on lakes in Cambodia. I was lucky enough to be funded by ACCARNSI to travel to Cambodia to carry out my research and then to present my findings at conferences all around Australia and in Europe.

I am currently studying a Masters of Antarctic Science and will be going to Svalbard, Norway, later this year to study. Whilst I haven’t entirely worked out what it is I want to do when I grow up, I have no doubt it will involve asking lots and lots of questions about the world and working hard to find out those answers and then telling people all about it, which to me is what science is all about.

For further information: www.imas.utas.edu.au; www.spacecamp.no