Question: What made you change your mind from becoming a marine biologist?

Joe Bathelt answered on 8 Nov 2016:

First of all, I do not mean to say that Marine Biology is not fascinating and a very important area of investigation, but my personal direction changed for several reasons. First, I realised at uni that my image of Marine Biology was quite different to the actual day-to-day work. I had naively pictured amazing dives in far away places. However, it looked more like it involved mostly lab work with organisms that I found less interesting, e.g. sponges and algae.

I also took some courses in brain physiology, which I found fascinating because it could be related to how thinking works and how people with various disorders are affected. It also coincided with one of my friends at uni suffering from severe mental illness. The treatments that he received did not seem to be very effective and I thought that there must be better ways of understanding and tackling these problems. I also started listening to science podcasts around the time that contained interviews with scientists. The brain science was fascinating and had me hooked very quickly. The combination of these factors made me decide to specialise in human neuroscience in the end and I never regretted that decision.