From a grandmother's garden to Ireland's fields: Katie's story

Hi, I'm Katie. I recently completed my MSc in Sustainable Environments at the University of Galway, after studying Botany and Plant Science. Plants have been one of the great loves of my life for as long as I can remember, and I feel incredibly lucky to have built a career out of that love. I don't come from a family full of green thumbs, but since university, meeting like-minded people and exploring different corners of nature and ecology, I've realised just how much that passion was always there.

Where it started

My love of nature began young, gardening with my grandmother. My mum definitely didn't get the gardening gene, so it became this little thing that was just for me and her, and that's where my appreciation for plants really took root.

But the moment I realised I wanted to do something to protect the environment came years later, at a concert in Dublin in 2024. Before the show, they played a video about the environmental projects and charities they support. I was sitting beside my mum, watching all these people doing incredible things, and something just clicked. I remember thinking: that's what I want to do. I want to help. I want to do something that actually means something.

No such thing as a typical day

One of the things I love about my role is that there isn't really a typical day. Some days I'm out in the field doing surveys; others I'm back in the office working through everything I've collected. I might be checking trail cameras for badger activity one day and writing reports the next. Because I'm still early in my career, a lot of my time goes on learning too, writing and rewriting reports with feedback from the ecologists around me, and learning to carry out Appropriate Assessment Screenings properly, understanding the reasoning behind each step rather than just following a template.

What makes it matter is knowing our work gives nature a voice in projects where it might otherwise be overlooked. A lot of what we do isn't visible to the people who'll eventually use a road or a bridge, but the ecological work behind it makes a real difference, identifying a protected species, assessing how a project could affect a habitat, recommending ways to reduce those impacts. I love that something I've surveyed or helped assess could ultimately lead to a habitat being protected or an impact avoided.

The day I found the larval webs

One of my proudest moments so far was during a survey for marsh fritillary butterflies, a threatened species in Ireland. We were searching a beautiful field full of devil's-bit scabious, looking for the larval webs that show they're breeding there. We'd been searching a while and were starting to think we might not find anything, and then I spotted one. I was genuinely so excited, and once we found one, we started seeing more, with other butterflies flitting around the field. I've always had a special love for butterflies, so being the one to confirm they were using that habitat meant a lot. It was one of those days where I thought: this is exactly why I love what I do.

Not everything is butterflies, though. Monitoring badger activity along the route of a proposed road development has been fascinating in a completely different way, using trail cameras to build a picture of where they're moving. It feels like putting together a puzzle: we review the footage, see where the activity is, and use what we learn to decide where the cameras go next. You start to know the landscape from the animals' perspective rather than just seeing it on a map.

Growing into it

Coming from Botany and Plant Science, I always assumed I'd spend most of my life in a lab. I never imagined I'd be pulling on wellies to look for butterflies, checking cameras for badgers, or trying to identify every bird I hear. Being out in the field has grown my identification skills in a way university theory never could, and my report writing has been tested too, learning to work efficiently while still doing the job properly. I'm lucky to have a supportive team I can lean on, and I've become a much better multitasker, I can start the morning on one project and be juggling three by the evening.

If I had to describe the team in three words: supportive, diverse and welcoming. There's such a range of knowledge that there's nearly always someone who has experience in whatever's caught my interest that week, and from the start I've felt comfortable getting involved and being myself.

My advice, and why I stay

If you're thinking about joining, come in without your mind set on one area. Towards the end of college you can develop tunnel vision about what your career is "supposed" to look like, but being open to different areas can lead you somewhere you never expected to enjoy. And ask questions, being surrounded by experts is daunting, and you can feel like you should know more than you do, but you're there to learn. Ask the "silly" ones. We all start somewhere.

I chose AtkinsRéalis because I wanted to experience as much as possible, to get out in the field and figure out what kind of ecologist I wanted to become. I stay for the people and the chance to keep learning. I don't feel I need my whole career figured out yet, I have the space to explore it, and I'm grateful for that every day.

Ireland's biodiversity needs people who care about protecting it. If that sounds like you, see what our Environment team is working on.