What to Expect

Be prepared to learn your biology and psychology if you want to study primatology.

Megan Bulloch had her first exposure to primatology when she took an honors psychology degree. During her final year, she took a course in evolutionary psychology. "This was one of my favorite courses and I was more challenged and interested in that course than any other I attended," she says.

Bulloch then decided to do graduate work in primatology.

"Probably the largest influence on my decision was a gorilla, Kakinga, that I met in the zoo. It was the first time that I'd seen an ape up close and it totally changed my opinion and belief about what they are capable of and what's going on inside their heads."

The workload for a primatology student is heavy. "The work is extremely time-consuming and often physically strenuous," says Julie Teichroeb. She took a master's degree in primatology. "Usually, you just have to take it one day at a time and take each new challenge as it comes."

Fieldwork is exciting, though. "If you are doing fieldwork, this could involve being in a far-off country, waking up before dawn to find your monkey, ape or prosimian group and following them from dawn to dusk, recording whatever behaviors you are interested in. If you are doing laboratory or captive observations or experiments, full days would be spent in the lab."

Bulloch remembers one period when she was really stressed. "I was horrible to be around. I was working 18-hour days, living off of coffee with no sleep, trying to get a proposal and lit review perfect before I handed them in to committee," she says.

"I had a proposal defense where the professors on my committee sat and asked me questions about my research for an hour and a half. I had 140 exams to mark and 20 papers to mark. I had a paper due, an oral presentation and a statistics assignment, plus my own coursework."

Bulloch believes that graduate school is "more work than you'll probably ever do in any field. You never get to turn it off and go home. Instead, you eat, sleep and breathe monkeys. You need to be completely dedicated. Your work and research has to come before anything else or it won't work."