Naomi Smith, BSc (Hons) Wildlife and Conservation Management. Aberdeen

“I’ve loved it all, the entire experience if I’m honest. There’s not one part of it that I’ve enjoyed more than the rest. I’ve loved the learning, and the interactions with other students, I’ve loved every minute and made friends for life.”

When lockdown first hit, as was the case for so many others, Naomi Smith found it was an opportunity to re-evaluate her life.

The 32-year-old was employed as a dental nurse, the same line of work she had been in for over a decade, and she felt a change was long overdue. She had left school at 15 and fallen into the first career that would take her. She wanted to take some agency, some control, it was time to change her life.

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“I had the opportunity, so I took the voluntary redundancy from my job. I googled options for study, and I really liked the look of Wildlife and Conservation Management at SRUC” she said.

“I phoned them for a chat and mentioned I didn’t have the relevant entry qualifications for the course, but they were more than happy to take my life experience into consideration, whereas other universities wouldn’t have looked my way.”

Beginning study, Naomi soon found that her passion for the outdoors wasn’t sated by the course alone, she needed something more. It began with just a few sheep and soon she was taking dozens of animals into her smallholding in Aberdeenshire, with a focus on their conservation,

“I realised how much I could tie in my love of animals with conservation, and it was a no-brainer" she said. “We focus on native rare breeds; pigs, sheep, goats, cattle, and Eriskay ponies.

“There’s less than 400 Eriskay ponies in the world; we’re looking to increase their numbers, that’s my other passion, volunteering with the Eriskay Pony Society”.

Balancing her studies with work, volunteering, and her animals was no easy task however, and she experienced more than a few tough times. She pulled through on each occasion, thanks to the help of her lecturers,

“The approachability of the staff was brilliant, they were almost just like friends as well as lecturers” she said. “There was never a time that we felt like we couldn’t approach them, whether that was about uni work or our personal lives”.

She also found levels of dedication within herself for study which surprised her, manifested most clearly in her choice of her final honours dissertation,

“I was proud of my dissertation; I spent my days off from my full-time seasonal access ranger job last summer in the SRUC lab dissecting badger scat” she said.

“It was fascinating, I was working alongside Science and Advice for Scottish Agriculture (SASA) looking into spatio-temporal patterns within badger diet across Scotland.

“I learned a whole new skill in the lab and it was something that I managed to do on my own.”

In the end, her drive paid off handsomely, she has since achieved a First, something she never expected. She now hopes to expand awareness of conservation grazing using her animals, to help farmers and the environment in tandem.

If she has one regret, it’s only that she didn’t make the switch sooner,

“I hummed and hawed changing career for years, and now I’m at the point where I wish I’d done it long ago. If you’re thinking of changing your career, just go for it. Life’s too short to stay in a job you aren’t fulfilled by.”