Beau Picking: Humans of BioSciences
Meet Beau Picking (they/them), a mycologist and Master of Science grad who loves to spend their time outside the lab competing in tabletop role-playing games and costume designing.
Who are you and what do you do in the School?
I completed a Master of Science (Botany) supervised by Mike Bayly in the Plant Systematics research lab between 2015 and 2017. My project was focused on mycological taxonomy, performing species delimitation in a section of native mushrooms from the genus Cortinarius. Since 2015 I have worked as a demonstrator for many subjects especially first year biology and second year botany subjects. I have also worked as a research assistant, namely on the thunderstorm asthma and pollen allergy project. Excitingly, the data I collected was published this year.
I also tutor and lecture in other faculties at the University of Melbourne, including the Faculty of Veterinary and Agricultural Science, as well as the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning. I really enjoy all the teaching that I do and love increasing students’ knowledge of science.
What do you enjoy doing outside of science?
One of my biggest hobbies outside science is tabletop role-playing games, like Dungeons and Dragons. I either run games for my friends, or regularly play in multiple games each week, including one that is streamed online with a semi-regular audience. For me, the elements of fantasy and group storytelling give me an avenue to express my creative side that doesn’t always happen in science teaching and research. Other hobbies that I enjoy are making jewellery, sewing, and modifying clothes; again, it is the creative aspect that I enjoy as an outlet away from more rigorous thinking.
During your Masters did you run into any setbacks or face any challenges? How did you overcome them?
There were plenty of setbacks in my lab work. In the beginning, I was planning to use seven loci (regions of DNA) to perform the species delimitation, but we had to reduce that to 5 loci after a lot of troubleshooting and months of failed PCRs. That’s one of the problems with trying to find primers that will work for many different, undescribed species. Another setback was the data analysis. I had a patchy dataset at the end of the project, which meant that I couldn’t run the analysis I had set out to use at the beginning. So I had to start hunting through many different multi-locus species delimitation analyses and find one that would work for my data set of close to 1000 DNA sequences for all of the different specimens…
Do you have any advice for current/other students?
I would say that other students really need to think about the balance between their studies, life outside university, and work. In retrospect, I really spent too much time on my teaching work that was ongoing from before I started my Masters. It detracted from some of the subjects that I took as part of my Masters. I would have like to have finished with a higher final grade, but I had to make decisions between marking my first-year students’ assignments and doing my own. The balance between getting good grades and being able to afford rent and other expenses is something that I wish I had considered more. I could have sacrificed some income to be able to spend more time on my research and coursework.
