>>12756777Unless you are smart about the projects you choose, "marine biology" is statistics and you will spend maybe 5% of your time doing fieldwork and 95% of it looking at data in excel, then manipulating it in stats software. Most projects that get thrown to unestablished plebeians are a mass of data points from fisheries and surveys for you to wrangle into a spreadsheet and graph. If you are interested, study at a university or institute with very high research output, this will maximise your chances of not getting jaded.
I want to be a research assistant just so I can do manual labour for PhDs. If I want to do my own projects I will have to become a lifer and do postgraduate.
Protip: get SCUBA qualified ASAP and volunteer for everything. Look into scientific diving. Even better, just go to maritime school and become a skipper for a research vessel
There aren't "no jobs", you just need to get experience before you can take them.