The right student

Students are important team members who will often become specialist in areas making them invaluable for the success of a project. It is important to select students who can get along well with their team members, who have a good science background and an interest in the project area.

Points of interest for teachers:
What makes students important team members?

Transcript

DR MEGAN BALKS
I become very dependent on students because, like Leah has been learning some of the details of how to programme our data loggers and manage the data and so on. And these are things that although I have a broad understanding of what we’re trying to do I haven’t got the time to put in the nuts and bolts. And so in the case of Leah, it was the right student in the right place at the right time. The project we wanted to do was about looking at all this climate data so and Leah has expressed an interest in meteorology and so she was keen to be doing something in that area. Leah was a good student, she’s got good grades, she’s keen and enthusiastic. I have to have a student who I can rely on to be well behaved. We don’t want to get a bad name at Scott Base for students who spend all night learing up in the bar instead of getting on with their work. And so, you know, I’m looking for someone who’s going to be responsible and reliable and take the work seriously. But ultimately she’d done the right papers, her background with the hydrological sciences, really good skills with data base management, and reasonably mathematically literate – those sorts of things that were what we needed for the kind of project we had in mind in this case.