Early Career Ecologist Section organized & suggested events General resources: Kiddie corp: http://www.esa.org/portland/child-care/ Strategies for success: http://www.esa.org/portland/esa-annual-meeting-strategies-for-success/ Sat 5 Aug 2017 5p-9p: WK7: Saturday Night Special! Get a job: strategies and tactics for early-career ecologists in finding and landing your dream career. Registration fee: 30 USD. Doubletree Hotel – Idaho. Sun 6 Aug 2017 8a-5p: WK17 – Exploring diverse career pathways in…

Whether you’re finishing an undergraduate degree or a Ph.D., this can often be a dreaded question.  The decision of what comes next can be a daunting one.  Having recently completed a Ph.D., this question and decision process is fresh in my mind. Graduate school brought me to Alberta, Canada from the U.S., and I began my graduate school career studying…

With recent attacks on science by Congress and the Trump administration, it has become clear that there is a need, now more than ever, for scientists and experts to educate the public and influence decision makers on science-based policies. For an advocacy-minded young scientist, that might be difficult in an academic environment that prioritizes research over public engagement.   Please…

As I was reading through Adam Grant’s recent book Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, a quote he references by Einstein made me think about the ideas that early career scientists generate: “A person who has not made great contributions to science by the age of 30 will never do so.” This quote got me thinking about how the landscape…

I was first exposed to the notion of corporate engagement when I read a New Yorker piece that featured interviews with Peter Kareiva and Mark Tercek.  Peter is former Chief Scientist at The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and Mark is a former executive at Goldman Sachs and now CEO of TNC.  TNC and other big conservation NGOs have really advanced the…

Call for ESA Mentors! Early Career Mentoring Program Ecological Society of America Meeting, Portland, 2017 If you are interested in becoming a potential ESA Mentor and will be attending the 2017 meeting in Portland, please fill out our ECMP Google form by April 20, 2017. Description: Conferences provide unique opportunities for biologists to interact with others in their field; however,…

Striving for Work-life Balance Being an early career ecologist is tough. Launching an ecology career requires a lot of hard work and sacrifice as you seek to set a research agenda, build collaborations, write grants, and publish, publish, publish. This is all the more challenging if you want to have a life outside of your career. I went to graduate…

As scientists, one would think that we would approach all areas of our careers using the same evidence-based decision making that we use in our research. However, this is often not the case when it comes to teaching our college level science classes.  Most new faculty have little training in best practices of effective instruction, and are left to “sink…

We are now accepting applications from late-stage graduate students and post docs for our 2017 Early Career Mentorship Program. The program pairs mentees with established ecologists who share similar career interests, based around the 2017 ESA Annual Meeting in Portland. Please spread the word!

Data and publishing Data publication has been a new endeavor for me and was not addressed during my training in graduate school.  I have my first data publication out (Roberts et al. 2016) and have more in-progress.  Given my recent look into this, I thought it would be worth posting this topic to prompt further discussion within early career ecologist…

  Secretary’s Note: Below I have included the full meeting agenda that we began with, but we did not get to cover quite a bit of this at the meeting-proper. I have made efforts to distinguish what we did cover versus what we did not. M Aiello-Lammens   Attendees:   Brief Introductions Discussion of our views on the role(s) our…

We’re running a targeted Early Career Mentoring program again this year! Conferences provide unique opportunities for biologists to interact with others in their field; however, these opportunities are rarely structured to promote meaningful interactions between the next generation ecologists and more senior scientists. Access to strong mentors both within and outside of their main institution is critical to support early…