Marine Biologist, is it a good, fun, well-paying job?

Question

The ocean along with the animals that live among it are a great interest of mine, and a Marine Biologist sounded like a nice job. But I was just wondering what the job was really like. Including, fun, good, well-paying job that is worth going to collage for. It would also be nice if I could know the specific jobs that they do, or if it matters what degree you have. Is masters or bachelors better? What subjects do you have to take in school? Trigonometry? Physics? Which job is better? Veterinarian or Marine Biologist (these jobs are my top 2) Also, how many years of collage do you have to take?

This information will help me greatly.

Thank you.

Answer 1

Well-paying and marine biology generally do not go very well together. It's a job you definitely cannot do for the pay! You usually start of with a fairly low pay and competition for jobs can be quite fierce but if you are passionate about the subject and persevere something will turn up.

You are generally advised to get as high a degree as possible, definitely a BSc., preferably an MSc. or a Phd. as it will increase your chances on the job market.

In the UK, you can generally do a BSc. in 3 years, an MSc. in 1 and a Phd. varies greatly, 1-4 years maybe.

The US is slightly more, 4 years for a BSc., 2 years for an MSc and then again 1-4 years for a Phd.

Even with those degrees though you may have to do some volunteer/intern work before you land a real job, so take that into account.

Marine biology covers quite a variety of subject areas, the one that mainly draws people to marine biology however is the image often perpetrated by TV documentaries of someone driving around boats in the sun and jumping in the water/watching/working with dolphins/whales/sharks while film crews are recording every move. While there are jobs working with these animals and most of them will involve field work and some amount of boating, this is rather misleading as it is nowhere near as 'glamarous' and fun as it is made out to be and it focuses on a minority group, ie. scientists working with large charismatic animals. Most marine biologists work with significantly smaller animals or algae or bacteria. These documentaries also neatly cut out all the lab work and data analysis for obvious reasons, who would want to watch someone analyse data for a week? In reality though you would have a good 2 or 3 lab days to input data you get from one field day and that is without analysing it!

What exactly you end up doing depends heavily on the field you choose, you could spend the day processing water samples in the lab and counting algal cells under a microscope (for example if you study red tide), you could be analysing tissue samples to find out contaminant levels in different species of marine animals, you could be teaching at a university, you could be writing grant proposals and meeting with potential sponsors, you could be on the computer doing research and reading up on papers relevant to your own research, you could be statistically analysing your data and writing up the results, you could be on the shore measuring algae fronds or setting up quadrants to study inter-tidal communities, you could be out on the boat doing research and experiments; for example fishing and evaluating the catch, or taking plankton samples- in short there is a lot of things you could be doing, from complete desk jobs to research jobs out at sea.

What subjects you should take depends what you want to focus on usually universities are happy for you just to do a second science, definitely biology obviously. If you are interested in oceanography, physics is a good second choice. Statistics is definitely very helpful as well, especially if it involves using statistic packages on the computer.

I can't claim to know about veterinary science so won't try and compare the two, but if you want a well paying job, go for veterinarian!

For more information on marine biology, I strongly recommend this site which gives a lot of valuable information:

http://marinebio.org/

There is also a specific section dealing with education and career question if that is what you are interested in:

http://marinebio.org/MarineBio/Careers/

For discussing your interest in marine biology and asking questions I strongly recommend their forums:

http://planktonforums.org/

There are also a few interviews with marine biologists that will give you more of an insight:

http://planktonforums.org/viewtopic.php?...