Conferences – what we do in the off-season
As I hope is evident from my blog, I am passionate about sharing my research, stories, and scientific facts with a broad audience. I hope I can use my platform to share ideas with other people, and to spark an interest in science for people that may not “do” science as their job. I also like to talk with professionals in the wildlife management field, since they are the ones incorporating scientific knowledge into real life management of populations and habitats. Since I am now back at the university, I have the opportunity to travel to professional conferences and share the progress of my research, and to network with other scientists.
This year, The Wildlife Society held its annual conference in Winnipeg, Manitoba – and an abstract about my research was accepted as a poster presentation for the event. Posters are meant to be a capsule of the project – detailed-yet-concise descriptions of the methods, analyses, results, and interpretation. It should also convey the background of the scientific question, and put the research into a broader context for what it means to wildlife management.
As I only have one field season of data, and since I have not completed any analyses yet, I had to fill the 3 foot by 4 foot poster with pictures of sitatunga and (unfortunately) a lot of text about what we propose to do and what we hope to use to analyze the data. Still, due in no small part to the skill of my graphic designer husband, I had an awesome poster to share with wildlife professionals around the world.
Another part of the conference was a photo contest! I took over 10,000 pictures while I was in Uganda (sure, most of those were of sitatunga, but there were other things in there too!), and James and I had built up quite a catalog of images during our hikes and travels. Naturally, I was inspired to share some of these pictures with the TWS attendees. Here are some of the pictures I entered:
A picture of a spider won best-in-show, but I have plenty for next year’s competition as well!
Since my career has taken me across the continent, the conference was also an opportunity to network with some of my former colleagues, and to make new professional connections. There were a few opportunities to meet and mingle with other scientists and wildlife students, and I took full advantage. There was also a smartphone app designed specifically for the event, and I used it to share pictures, thoughts, and comments as the conference progressed.
This year’s conference was an opportunity to bond with some of the other graduate students here at the University of Alberta. Since the U of A is in Edmonton, and the conference was in Winnipeg, some graduate students opted to drive instead of fly – a 14-hour road trip across Canada’s Great Plains. It was long, but we tried to make the best of it! I also ended up sharing a hotel room with 3 other students. I accidentally scared my roommates with a horror movie on the first night (a movie I had seen and did not find scary at all – two of the others disagree wholeheartedly!), but other than that I think it went pretty well.
Overall, it was a great break from the monotony of lab work, even though I have tons of work to do before I head back for my second field season in Uganda. I hope to have an opportunity to attend more conferences, and to share my research with new audiences!