In cooperation with the Mentorat and the Meteorology and Geophysics Student Council at the University of Bonn, a casual lecture series entitled “Work Mode Off - Meteorology and Geophysics at Work” was launched. Once a month, someone comes to our institute and talks about their professional life in this field. This is intended to show students the different perspectives and opportunities offered by this degree program and thus serve as additional motivation. It is also intended to illustrate how diverse the career paths can be in order to arouse the interest of young people and get more people interested in meteorology. The whole thing does not take place as part of a stiff lecture, but rather as a kind of relaxed discussion, which is largely based on questions from the students.
The lecture series started in November and will now take place once a month before the student council's games evenings.
On the first date, Simon Hauser was a guest, who reported on his ship expedition on the Labrador Sea. He is a doctoral student at our institute and therefore works in research, which means a completely different working life than in the private sector. The opportunity to travel on a research vessel is primarily offered in research, but expeditions and business trips to distant parts of the world are also found in other professional fields.
The second guest was Charlotte Baur, who completed her Master's degree in Physics of the Earth and Atmosphere at the University of Bonn in 2023 and now works for a reinsurance company as a catastrophe modeling specialist. She models various natural disasters such as earthquakes, hailstorms, storms and forest fires in different parts of the world. These represent the probability of occurrence and what consequences they are likely to have based on history. This can be used to estimate the approximate extent of the damage and therefore the sum insured in the event of a natural disaster. This gives the reinsurance company a basis on which to decide which contracts to enter into and at what prices.
These lectures should help to achieve one of the goals of our KlimaOER project, which is to attract new students to this subject area and minimize the drop-out rate.