This week Sian and I once again visited The Crown Estate, the funding partner of our internship, with a packed calendar filled with exciting, and some one-of-a-kind, opportunities.

The week began with Insights training. What is that you ask? Insights uses the results from an evaluator, which essentially includes a series of personality traits or statements and each person must fill out how much they feel they agree. Our answers created a personal profile for ourselves, which describes our strengths, how our relationships with other people work and how we react to change or deal with different situations, to name a few. Our profiles also included our unconscious and conscious personality traits, and from our answers the system could pick up how much we were dialling up or down our traits without being aware. The results were weirdly accurate for Sian and I; we came out of the session feeling more self-aware and understand better how to work with each other based off our profiles!

That afternoon the Marine Futures and Coastal Explorer interns had the pleasure of once again meeting with Dan Labbad, CEO of The Crown Estate. We discussed his career progression, how the choices and challenges he has made in his career have shaped who he is today and the actions he takes in his role as CEO, and his advice for us interns as we continue our careers. We admired his high levels of self-awareness and self-reflection; over his career he has come across many challenges, but by reflecting on his actions and sticking to his core values, he has reached the position of CEO. His advice was really valued by us, what an opportunity!

On the second morning we had the pleasure of meeting Olivia Thomas, the Head of Marine Planning. She discussed her career progression, gave us an insight into the daily runnings of the Marine Planning team and gave us tailored advice on our projects. We also met a number of internship alumni from The Crown Estate, discussing their careers and how to get the most out of our internship. Thank you to Olivia, Juliette Larson, Isabelle Grieveson, Natalie Smith and Katie Margerum for their advice and on-going support in our projects.

Sian and I also met with Amber Gould, alumni from the Marine Futures North West programme, to discuss her internship project on marine net gain – an emerging concept that means new developments will have to make the marine environment they are building in better than it was before any developments. A big thanks to Amber for her guidance!

Next week Sian and I will be out in the field for seagrass seed collection, so keep an eye out for the next blog post.