We all know (on the down-low) that many projects extend beyond the funding/planned period. Many of these circumstances are beyond the candidate’s control: delays in receiving equipment; faulty machinery; participants leaving the research prematurely; a series of failed experiments; unexpected results, or simply that you need more time to think and make sense of your data. So what do we do?

Carolyn Thompson, a Roehampton postgraduate and primatologist is featured in The Guardian in an article about her career path after graduation.

Carolyn Thompson was told at school that she wasn't good enough to study sciences. She persevered anyway and is now studying forgotten apes around the world. 

Carolyn Thompson has travelled widely, from Borneo to Cameroon, as a primate conservation researcher – a career she carved out with the right postgrad qualification.

In this podcast conversation we talk about fieldwork mistakes that Carolyn has learned from, writing children’s books to inspire conservation, becoming a PhD student without being a natural scientist, and how she has crowd-funded her own PhD to the tune of over £17,000.

Carolyn Thompson is a fierce woman trying to protect the newly discovered Skywalker gibbon from extinction. Here is a podcast of Victoria Austin's, founder of the Fierce Women's Collective, interview with her.

I wake up at 3am. It is still dark as I fumble around for my trusty head torch and compass. A quick coffee and a few spoonfuls of rice and I’m ready. It is so quiet as my fellow researcher and I head into the undisturbed forest. After walking for almost an hour, we stop and wait. As dawn slowly starts to emerge, the forest suddenly sings to life, literally! A beautiful gibbon chorus carries across the canopy. My work day has just begun.

Inspired by the great female primatologists that have gone before her, OU graduate Carolyn Thompson has always had a passion for apes. Despite being told by her careers advisor at school to pursue a different path because she "did not have a good grasp of maths and science," she persevered, and thanks to the OU was able to achieve her dream of studying forgotten apes all across the globe.

A primate named after a Star Wars character is under threat of extinction in China and a Wandsworth researcher wants to protect it.

Carolyn Thompson, a Ph.D. student at University College London, is studying the newly described and little-known Skywalker hoolock gibbon. She is working with the very team that first described the small ape in the China-Myanmar border region. Thompson hopes that her research will contribute to the gibbon’s threat assessment on the International Union of Conservation for Nature Species Red List.