George West

Background

About George West

Spending a month on the island Borneo with a group of strangers was the best time of my life. Going so far out of my comfort zone to meet new people and experience new things changed me as a person for the better. It also lead me to discover what I wanted to achieve in life. I had always had a love of the natural world, walking in the woods, begging my parents for a dog, visting the zoo and, of course, watching documentaries by Attenborough. However visiting a rainforest, seeing so much diversity of life first hand was amazing, seeing the threats facing biodiversity was equally devastating. That trip in 2012 made me determined to have a career in Conservation, everyone talked about climate change, deforestation and how terrible it is that all these wonderful creatures are going extinct, but few people seem prepared to do anything about it. So i wanted to go to Sixth Form and then to University. I studied hard and achieved this, the first person in my family to go to University. For 4 years I did the best I could, focusing on modules that covered Conservation and Ecology. My final year project was a year long undertaking and I had the amzing opportunity to work with and visit colleagues in Turkey to work on an actual conservation project. My hard work paid off and my project was used to write a paper on which I was the second author, my proudest achievement.