Laura van Galen:

So I’m Laura, and I studied botany, in particular forests. I didn’t know what I wanted to study when I finished school, but I chose plants because they just seemed interesting. I didn’t know much about them, and I really haven’t looked back since. I love being outside and learning about these things that we know so little about, and they’re so important to life on Earth.

Otago is a particularly good place to study plants because we have access to a huge range of different ecosystems. There’s grasslands and beech forests in Central Otago, there’s rainforests in Fiordland, and there’s coastal systems right here in Dunedin. Field trips have been one of the most exciting things—getting out there and seeing what plants are doing in their natural environment.

Dr Matthew Larcombe:

Hi guys, my name’s Matt Larcombe, I’m a lecturer in the Botany Department at the University of Otago, and if you’re interested in studying Botany, then the University of Otago is absolutely the place to do it because it’s the only university in New Zealand where you can study Botany.

So botany is life on Earth in terms of plants, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that plants are absolutely fundamental to life. Ok, so plants provide the oxygen that we breathe, and really importantly for us, they’ve formed the basis of our food chains. There’s three plants that provide about 40% of all the calories to humans, which is a huge proportion globally. Ok, so plants are fundamental not only to our life but also to the life of all of the other organisms in an ecosystem.

Plants, through the process of photosynthesis, convert sunlight to energy, and that provides all of the energy that subsequent biological processes are built on. So these are really important things to understand, and if you’re interested in that and interested in the natural world, then botany is a really great thing to study.

So if you study botany at Otago, in the first year you’ll do a subject called Plants: How They Shape the World, where you learn about the diversity of plants and fungi and also learn about that process of photosynthesis that’s so fundamental to life. You’ll go on to learn about plants and food—so agriculture, and how agriculture is actually an important thing, and how plants are the basis of most agriculture.

You’ll also learn about aquatic botany, so you learn about plants in the ocean and, in particular, photosynthetic organisms in the ocean and how they’re fundamental to the carbon cycle. Then you can go on to learn more about agronomics in second year, so biotechnology and how things like biofuels are created from plants, and how that’s going to be a really important way to reduce carbon in the future.

Then in third year, you go on and learn more about plant ecology and plant diversity generally, and then you’ve got the potential to go on and do more study at postgraduate level, as you’ll hear more about in a minute. You can also go from undergraduate straight out into the workforce.

We recently did some research that showed us where our graduates have gone, and we found that, for example, we’ve got graduates in basically every council in New Zealand. We’ve got graduates in all the Crown Research Institutes in New Zealand, all of the universities, and many other universities around the world as well. We’ve also got graduates in all of the Botanic Gardens, so there’s an incredible range of careers that you can undertake in botany, and lots of graduates in other industries as well—in management and in the private sector.

So if you want to study botany, come to Otago. It’s a great place to do it. I hope to see you soon.