Having recently returned from the first year Earth Sciences trip to the Isle of Arran off the coast of Scotland, learning science in the field for the first time led me to ponder how this style of learning differed from what I was used to. I began to question whether the indoor or outdoor approach to learning in the Natural Sciences could be crowned superior.

The purpose of the Arran trip was to bring together everything that we’d learnt so far, and to observe it with our own eyes in the natural world. It certainly delivered – I saw dinosaur footprints, petrified lightning, huge igneous features, and fossils in cave walls to name but a few, and it’s certainly true that my understanding of the concepts dramatically improved. This style of teaching differs from any other offered within the typical Cambridge model of lectures, labs, and supervisions, perhaps because of the collective atmosphere inevitably created when you’re shoulder to shoulder with academics pondering the same rock formation.

“You are simply a group of academics trying to understand the environment around you”

Although this was initially intimidating, I soon found that there need not be any trepidation about asking questions; unlike in a supervision, the ‘academic vs us’ feeling is gone – you are simply a group of academics trying to understand the environment around you, with no exam and no one trying to trip you up. When on a sparsely populated island with nothing else to do (and no phone signal!), you might as well apply yourself as best you can to furthering your understanding of what you’ve been taught for the past two terms.

Field trips also present a unique opportunity to make new friends long into the academic year. In some ways, it felt like a second freshers week; a group thrown into an unfamiliar situation and left to work together, get along, and go to the pub in the evening. This environment provides the perfect opportunity to finally talk to that person in your lectures you just knew you’d get along with, but never had the chance to properly speak to, and to meet the more mysterious members of your course for whom lecture attendance was never a priority.

“Field trips may impose barriers in terms of class and background”

This said, it would be remiss of me to shy away from the downsides of teaching in the field, which materialise as terrible weather conditions and the challenges of learning on an outcrop, amongst others. It is certainly not to everyone’s taste to scramble down a precarious-looking rockform to deduce as much as possible about its origin. Field trips may also impose barriers in terms of class and background. While some students are comfortable with ‘outdoorsy’ trips from growing up with high quality outdoor equipment and regular access to open countryside, other students, for whom field trips are their first such experiences, cannot justify the cost of the technical gear that makes a field trip significantly more enjoyable (think waterproof boots and quality base layers).

The nature of being in the field poses a potential issue in itself; the aim is no longer to learn from perfect specimens in the lab, but to develop the skillset to navigate through weathered rocks and rivers obstructing the way, and to tell the difference between a boulder and an outcrop to reveal the true picture. At times, this can make field work much less satisfying, and riddled with ‘can’t be certain’ scrawled in field notebooks. However, these moments are also a useful reminder that real world science is never as clear cut as in the lab.

Nevertheless, I look back at my first field trip fondly, despite the mud, rain, sleet, thorns, difficult terrain, rocks misidentified, and that never-ending coach journey home. It has undoubtedly been the most impactful learning experience of my first year at Cambridge, and has opened my eyes to the joys of learning science outdoors. I eagerly await my next opportunity to venture out of the lab and into the field.