For the next three months Kate Moise will rise at the crack of dawn and go into the swamp forests of Borneo to study the behaviour of juvenile gibbons for her MSc on primate conservation.

If that sounds tough, Kate reckons her stay in Borneo will be luxury compared with the experiences of others on her course, who will be camping for their research projects. “My friend will be living in a tent in Madagascar but I will be sleeping indoors, so I'm quite lucky. The idea is for me to be up and ready to go by 4.30am, listening for the gibbons' calls and following them on foot.”

Moise, 24, studied animal behaviour and welfare at Bristol University, after switching from a psychology degree when she realised her real interests lay in working with animals.

The MSc at Oxford Brookes University combines the expertise of anthropologists and biologists to examine primate conservation, emphasising relationships between humans and wildlife in forest and woodland environments. The course involves work in laboratories and in the field.

Students are expected to have an honours degree in anthropology, biology, ecology or psychology, but Moise says they are a mixed bag.

“We are quite a diverse group. Some have come straight from a first degree but we also have a zookeeper, a researcher from Madagascar, someone from the Republic of Congo, another who studied nutrition and someone who was filming for the BBC. A lot of the people have already done voluntary work with primates.

“I find the course so interesting and lectures inspiring. They give you hope because you see that people go out and do things that change what is happening. It makes me think, while I may be a little cog, I can also make a difference to help to save primates and other species. To me, to lose a species is a tragedy and it has a huge knock-on effect on other species. A world without animals and diverse plants would be a sad place to live in.”

Moise is going to a gibbon behavioural ecology project in Central Kalimantan, Borneo. “I expect to get quite close to the gibbons because they are used to being followed and I'll be looking at juvenile social and play behaviour.”

So far the MSc has taken Moise, who grew up in Dorset with a dog, cat and horse, to a Cotswold wildlife centre, a woolly monkey sanctuary in Cornwall and an animal park in Appenheul in the Netherlands. After completing her masters she hopes to find work with an animal charity or with the BBC.

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