A Manic Few Weeks

June 30, 2018June 30, 2018 | Rebecca Gibson

The past few weeks have been a whirlwind! I have now completely moved out of Carlisle and come back home in Hertfordshire to spend time with my family and Cockapoo puppy, who at five years old is finally starting to calm down.

I’ve been back for a fourth visit to the Warner Bros Studio Tour of Harry Potter, and was throughly impressed by the new Forbidden Forest, not to mention the Butterbeer ice cream. I won’t give away too many spoilers as it’s an incredible place that you need to see to truly believe. I’ve been a Harry Potter fanatic for a million years and always get teary-eyed when I go. Even my Uncle Rod who was indifferent to Harry Potter ended up taking dozens of photos.

I’ve also had my final results from university and was thrilled to discover I achieved first class honours, though I have to wait until November until graduation! It seems as though I shall need the cap and gown to keep me warm after spending the summer in the much hotter south.

But I barely had time to celebrate my results before I managed to secure an internship at an animal sanctuary in Florida! I will be working for SEZARC (South East Zoo Alliance for Reproduction and Conservation) and I’ll be getting involved with a lot of lab work. One of SEZARC’s main lines of work is carrying out health studies to try and resolve reproductive issues that rare and endangered animals face when breeding.

It’s such an exciting and important area of conservation and something I’ve never had the chance to get involved with. I’m so excited to begin, but I’ll need to wait a little longer yet. I fly out at the start of August and work for two months before returning at the end of September. Just yesterday I booked all my flights as well as an international driving licence. Driving in America is quite a daunting prospect but seeing as there is no public transport in that part of Florida, I don’t have much choice! I’m quite nervous about going so far alone but I know I’ll love it once I get into the swing of things.

Now I have all of July to continue preparations for my extraordinary expedition! I dread to think how long my packing list will be…

Magazine Module: Finished!

April 22, 2016 | Rebecca Gibson

Producing an eight page magazine for one of my university modules was a number of different adjectives: exciting, fun, stressful, time-consuming, sometimes maddening. After weeks of editing and tweaking, it’s finished and I submitted the final piece yesterday.

The brief was fairly open – all we needed to do was write three articles about wildlife locations in Cumbria, then add a contents page, editor’s letter and design the front and back cover. Sounded simple enough, but Adobe InDesign is both a blessing and a curse. No error goes unnoticed, no matter how miniscule. For a neat freak and general perfectionist like me, this was quite refreshing at first. But even I grew exasperated at the exactness of the letter spacing, margin size and colour matching. Eventually, InDesign and I became friends, and now I feel fairly competent using an industry standard design programme that I’d never used previously.

This has been one of my favourite modules so far, and I’m really happy with the end product. Here’s hoping my lecturer is too!

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Identification Key Assignment

March 24, 2016March 23, 2016 | Rebecca Gibson

For OMED4050 Interpreting the Natural World for Media, I was given the task of designing a foldout identification key for a species. I chose finches because birds give my life meaning and anyone who knows me well understands my unconditional love for anything with feathers.

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Taking the Plunge (and taking a while to resurface)

October 11, 2015October 11, 2015 | Rebecca Gibson

Tomorrow begins my fourth week at university. I did it; I passed my A levels and at the end of September found myself on the long road from Hertfordshire to Cumbria. Now I’ve settled in to my new life in Carlisle, where I’ve begun studying Wildlife Media, my dream course.

I’m ashamed that it’s been so long since my last post. I have no worthy excuses; the days seemed to have slipped away without my knowing and before I knew it, it was October and I realised I hadn’t blogged since April.

To the loyal readers I once had, I’m sorry. If you continue to read my posts after such a long break, I truly thank you. If not, I don’t blame you for abandoning such a sloppy blogger.

We’ve had our lengthy interval. Now, I shall proceed into the second act. In some ways this is apt, seeing as I’ve just turned a major corner in my life and begun my degree nearly three hundred miles from home. Already I’m changing. I’m relying completely on myself, and even going so far as to introduce myself to a cookbook.

So here’s to the next act. If I have any audience left, I hope you enjoy.