GROWING up on eastern suburb beaches, Alexandra Schnell would get home from school and run down to the water, spending hours searching for sea slugs and sea stars in rock pools.
"I'd always really been captivated by the ocean," the now Lake Macquarie resident and marine biologist said.
She was just five-years-old when she had an encounter with an octopus at Clovelly Beach that planted the seed in what she wanted to do with her life.
"I came across this critter that I was just so enthralled with and when I came back to tell my parents one of their friends said 'why don't you become a marine biologist?'," she said.
Coinciding with Public Education Week from August 5 to 9, the 40-year-old reflected on her time in the public school system that allowed her to excel in her fascination with the seascape.
"Science is a universal language, it connects people across all cultures and economic backgrounds," she said.
"Public education played a really crucial role in nursing my curiosity and offered a strong foundation in subjects like physics, chemistry and biology which set me up to then go to university."
Her primary education was completed at Bondi Wellington and Clovelly Public School before completing high school at Randwick Girls High.
"I feel like I benefited from inclusive, supported environments and had access to well-equipped laboratories and guidance from dedicated teachers - that was all instrumental to my academic development," she said.
Dr Schnell went on to study a Bachelor of Marine Science at the University of Sydney and graduated with honours in 2007, followed by a PhD in Behaviour Ecology in 2015.
After an academic post with the University of Cambridge in the UK, Dr Schnell arrived back on NSW beaches, with her family settling in Lake Macquarie in 2021.
"We had always planned to come back because we love the ocean," she said.
Now working as a freelancer, she's still a visiting research association at the University of Cambridge and works at the interface of scientific research and media.
"I consult for different welfare organisations about animal behaviour and animal intelligence, and then I also do media for natural history film," she said.
Dr Schnell has worked for the BBC on their recent Planet Earth 3 series and Netflix's Our Oceans which is due to air later in the year.
Most recently she was a producer and lead storyteller of National Geographic's Sequence of the Octopus now streaming on Disney.
"I think my intel into the most recent research on animal behaviour and animal intelligence helped me get my foot in the door with the BBC, but I was always on the research side of things, setting up shoots in different parts of the world," she said.
She was approached by National Geographic for her research on cuttlefish intelligence but she was 38 weeks pregnant with her first-born daughter, Indiana at the time.
"I couldn't envision going on all these shoots with a newborn but the more I learned about the project, the more excited I got," she said.
"It was an incredible opportunity and they offered to bring my husband and baby along."
Dr Schnell researches animals that don't have a backbone, like octopus, cuttlefish and squid and their intelligent traits evolving in the animal kingdom.
"There's still so much we don't know, I feel like we're just scraping the tip of the iceberg," she said.
She said her curious mind has been fuelled from having the ability to make choices and own her development throughout school, something that she is seeing in her daughter.
"Agency is fundamental to every aspect of human growth. I can see it in my two-and-a-half year-old now. If I give her choices she has agency and she's striving for that independence," she said.
Dr Schnell has plans to continue freelancing while living in Lake Macquarie and has already scoped out public schools in the area for her daughter.
Growing up by the water is something she wanted for her child and now she too, can be captivated by the magic of the ocean.
"We've already checked out a little public school down the road from us for Indy, we haven't thought of high school yet," she said.
She said public education has equipped her with the opportunity to explore her passions and knew that would open doors for her children in the future.
