What does a typical day on the job look like?
I’m responsible for a team of seven or eight researchers and lecturers, so 50% of my job is admin and organizing enrichment [activities]. We don’t have a cruise director on expedition ships, so instead of entertainment, we have science. When an unexpected sea day happens, it falls on my shoulders to figure out morning, afternoon, and evening lectures, plus two or three workshops in between. It looks like everything happens magically but I plan ahead at the beginning of every voyage for just this reason. I know who’s on my team and what they have to offer. So let’s say John has seven lectures he’s prepared; if I’ve only scheduled him for three, then I have four in my back pocket. That’s the case for everybody that’s on my team: naturalists, biologists, chemists, geologists–they all bring expertise. The other 50% of the time, I’m in the lab or out in the field collecting samples.
What is your favorite part about this job?
Sharing humbling, awe-inspiring moments with people. Sometimes we’re on a Zodiac collecting samples for A, B, or C and a whale is four feet away and it hangs out with us for an hour. Sometimes it’s an unexpected sea day spent studying microplastic samples we collected the day before. Sometimes it’s meeting a woman who wanted to be a scientist but couldn’t because she went to school before Title IX was enacted and she gets to spend her voyage being a scientist with me in the lab.
What is the most challenging part about working at sea?
I miss my partner, of course. We live in Zurich, Switzerland and my cadence is two months on, two months off. He was a cruise director for 20 years; when I started this job, there was a large learning curve for living and working on a ship and he’d go, ‘Oh, that’s just ship life.’ He told me to pace myself, because there are no days off. And when you’re in upper management, there are no hours off. Yes, this thing needs to get done. But does it need to be done right now? No. Put it aside.
What is the coolest or weirdest thing about living on a ship?
Having 250 roommates. We have almost a one-to-one crew-to-guest ratio, with about 30 nationalities on board. My immediate team has a Belgian, a Brit, a Scot, and a Kiwi.
What is your favorite place you’ve traveled so far?
Antarctica, of course! Some people really like seeing the penguins and penguins are cute—okay, fine. But I’m a chemist and I really, really like ice. We go out on a Zodiac and I’m just floored by the scale. Because it’s so cold in Antarctica, there’s not much evaporation. Without evaporation, there’s no precipitation, so it snows very rarely. To see these ice formations that have taken 300 million years to accumulate all these individual layers, and that layering corresponds to climatic variations—like, wow. In many cases, no one has ever laid eyes on that piece of ice and may never again, and that’s because they’re constantly moving. The icebergs are always changing and when we come back next week, they will look very different. That’s an incredible experience.
