I come from a marine background, my dad is a boat builder, and I started sailing when I was about 5. As a result, choosing Oceanography as my university course seemed like a natural choice. It was a course which had a strong data focus, and meant I gained experience collecting and analysing a variety of marine survey data, as well as one that encouraged an already strong love of the sea and a deep commitment to the fight against climate change. I also taught sailing during school and university holidays, which acted as great training for building connections with people. When a job managing marine survey data from offshore projects with a strong emphasis on relationship building came up, I couldn’t believe my luck.

My days have plenty of variety, but a typical one would include a meeting with an offshore wind farm developer to discuss the survey work going on at the site, talk about the survey data they are going to submit or have submitted and to see if they can provide any interesting insights into the data. These meetings are crucial, as data submission to the MDE relies on good working relationships with our customers, and the meetings often throw up additional insight into the data. As such, there is plenty of meeting preparation in a typical day as well, including checking survey data has been through the quality assurance process. When I’m not speaking to customers, I spend time organising and looking into the data, focusing on key trends and identifying evidence projects to investigate these trends in more detail. I also work on content for the MDE website, which often includes visualising trends in the data, and the MDE mailbox usually throws up an interesting query or two for me to grapple with!

I enjoy the variety, the relationship building with my contacts, and the real sense that I’m utilising my degree. But I think what I love most of all about my job is the fact I get to work with this incredible, and important, resource. The MDE is a data goldmine which could potentially provide real insights for work fighting the climate and ecological emergencies. The knowledge that there is an overriding purpose to my job is amazing, focusing my efforts and inspiring me when I’ve spent 3 hours grinding through a spreadsheet.

The sheer quantity and variety of data on the MDE. This manifests itself in a lot of ways, from physically having to post a hard drive of data because it’s too big to transfer any other way, to having to feedback quality assurance comments on over 100 surveys to a developer. A single geophysical survey can be over 1TB of data, and we currently have over 350 of those alone.