From being pushed up a cliff, to scorching sun, to hours spent in the microbiology lab, here are some of the highs and lows of the overseas field course I took part in during my undergraduate degree!
Between my second and third year of my undergraduate degree, I was lucky enough to partake in an overseas field course in Peniche, Portugal. This was offered during my first year of university, where we had a lecture talking about the possibility of researching for a week overseas for our optional module in third year. That year, options included places from Ecuador to Scotland, and Portugal jumped out at me. All I had to do was pay for flights, as the food and accommodation for the week was paid for, which was brilliant! With the money saved from this I was able to visit Lisbon for the week before the course started in Peniche, and saw some beautiful things.
Before the course, I had numerous meetings with my lab partner and supervisor to design the project we wanted to carry out in Peniche, as well as talk about the resources available at the university we would be working in, Politecnico de Leiria. We also planned consumables and permissions of taking them abroad, as well as planning our daily schedules. During the project me and my partner were usually one of the first people out, and were always the last back as we had to go to the lab after collecting our data to grow the bacteria and make all our notes before returning to the hostel where we were staying.
Our project was based on researching antibiotic resistance in E. coli in relation to public health.
🧫 This was done by collecting samples from crabs (very difficult when the crab runs off with your swab!) and limpets in rock pools, along with fish from the fish market and supermarket, and sea and rock pool water samples. This was to analyse the antibiotic resistance in E. coli in places that many tourists/ locals would go such as beaches, as well as what could be touched by people (i.e rockpools and creatures in them), and what local food would most likely be consumed. We mapped out areas that we sampled from, to consider geographical location in our findings.
👩🔬 Working at the university Politecnico de Leiria, I filtered bacterial samples, prepped swabs, created fish samples, spread plates, and inoculated agar with 4 different common antibiotics. I found that there was a really high amount of antibiotic resistant E. coli in different areas of sea water, including multi drug resistant bacteria! The source of this bacteria could be from a number of things, including toilets, human transmission, or even from birds
I really enjoyed this experience, as I was able to work in a different lab and experience how beautiful Peniche is. This project gave me some really great skills, and let me design a project, carry out experiments and write a report. It was also really different to any other research I'd done before, I even had to be pulled up a cliff from a rock pool by my supervisor as the tide was coming in! It was a great chance to go into the field, collect data, process it and write up notes/analysis all in the same day. The setting wasn't bad either! I also got the chance to go to sea and saw some dolphins whilst collecting different depths of sea water samples, which was amazing, even if I was horrifically sea sick.
🥼 I was very fortunate that I only had to pay for flights for the actual research. There were so many benefits to this trip, from finding out about other people's research in areas I wasn't familiar with, learning new techniques, collecting my own data for the first time, and designing an experiment. The only downs of this course was that everything was done in only a week, and the mosquitos weren't my friends at all! Have a look and see if your university offers anything similar, as it's such a good experience and allowed me to see what research is like in another country!
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