I am Marline, a Nigerian Cameroonian who recently moved to Bergen to begin my Master’s in Biological Sciences, and BIO299 was one of the first elective courses I chose.  I have always loved research and have worked on projects outside academia, so I looked forward to learning about the different ways of doing academic research and writing.

For BIO299, I conducted research to understand biodiversity knowledge, nature connectedness, and pro-biodiversity behaviour among higher education students in Bergen. This is a baseline study that could contribute to a larger research project by Ragnhild Gya in the future, and I could not have had a more exciting topic to work with, nor a better supervisor. Working and learning under Ragnhild was definitely one of the best parts of this project. Making close acquaintances from class was also such a good experience. We bonded over shared values through the ethics class, had informal conversations outside class on our different research themes, and I even became friends with Celine, who worked on a parallel project with the same supervisor for BIO299.

My project was especially meaningful for me due to my love for socio-ecological research. I love working at the intersection of science, people, and policy. This project and all I learnt from BIO299 laid the foundation for the kind of work I hope to do for my Master’s thesis. Through this study, I was able to engage directly with indigent and international students through a survey, and my supervisor was always there to help with physical communication where language was a barrier, like the other schools we had to contact, and a lecturer who gave us the opportunity to come speak to students in his class about the survey.

My experience reminded me that science is also about communication, trust, and shared curiosity. Designing questions about daily habits, energy use, recycling, gas emission, and willingness to change parts of our lives for biodiversity made me reflect deeply on my own choices, too, interrogating my bias and self-introspecting on how environmentally friendly my own daily choices are. As our study results show from students who responded to the survey, knowing about biodiversity, wanting to care for it, and fully living our lives in ways that restore and preserve it are not always perfectly aligned, and that this gap is exactly where meaningful socio-ecological research belongs.

I still laugh when I remember the Gantt chart lecture, where our lecturer Vigdis Vandvik was teaching us how to correctly fill our charts. I thought of how much “thinking” goes into any research project and how much time we spend thinking and theorizing as scientists. I jokingly asked if “thinking” could be logged as part of our project hours. We all laughed and went ahead to do a lot of thinking throughout the semester, anyway, from thinking about a topic to thinking about our lab sessions to thinking about how to approach people to thinking about methods and meaning, thinking as we write, and thinking about our poster presentations and grades.

One of the most significant things I am taking from my BIO299 experience is how the course has helped me feel more grounded in both science and place, as a new international student. I am still learning the basics of Norwegian. I still get lost sometimes. But I have felt welcomed into academic spaces where my questions, my interests, and my voice do not sound alien, and that has made all the difference to me. I hope other international students who come after me will be able to experience Bergen not just as a city with the most beautiful nature and rain, but as a place of warmth, openness, and shared learning. Science can be serious, but it can also be generous and warm, with opportunities to laugh, think, and stay curious.

God jul.