Hi Dweeter,
A really good question. You can find general information on graduate prospects for the University of Exeter Zoology course
here.
I graduated from the Zoology with Year Abroad course in 2019, and so can also reflect on my own experience, and that of my classmates, to answer this. Personally, after graduating I went on to do a Masters by Research and am now completing a funded PhD on social evolution in termites. Lots of my classmates also went down this academic route and stayed in research doing a variety of different Masters, PhDs, and some from my year have even started postdocs too. So there is definitely the opportunity for further research and to stay in academia should you want to.
Some of my friends were more interested in science communication, and have gone on to roles working in communications for groups like the RSPB or Wildlife Trust, or have completed further study or training in wildlife photography or wildlife documentary filming (which the UK, and specifically the BBC Natural History Unit) is a world leader in. In fact, if you watched Planet Earth III on Sunday night, Hannah Pollock, a BSc Zoology graduate from Exeter, was involved in making that episode! You can read more about her career progression on this blogpost
here - this website is really handy and includes lot of other interview case studies with different alumni!
Lots of graduates decide that they want to do more practical work after finishing their degree, and might get jobs as ecological consultants, or working for a variety of conservation organisations both in the UK and abroad. Others might decide that they preferred experience in the lab, and so find work as lab technicians. Others still decide they might want to go into postgraduate vet medicine.
The good thing about the University of Exeter course is that there is lots of focus on transferable skills, for example critical thinking, written and verbal communication, experiment/study design, statistical analysis and programming (specifically in R). These kind of skills are highly desirable across industries, and will be sought after by employers even outside of zoology or biology. In zoology/ecology a lot of our data sets tend to be quite messy, because the real world and real animals can be quite complicated compared to doing science in a controlled lab environment. This means we tend to have to use more complex statistical techniques and data wrangling to deal with this, which is a really important skill set as more and more industries are revolutionised by big data.
To help with employability throughout your degree, you'll have access to the University of Exeter's Career Zone (both during and after your degree!).They helped me with writing my CV, interview prep and finding different placements during the summers of my undergraduate degree. You can read more about their services
here.
If you have any more questions, let me know.
Kingsley
University of Exeter Student Ambassador