Meetings Galore

While it's not always the most exciting aspect of a scientist's job, this week I have spent much of my time in meetings. These meetings ranged from project updates, planning and discussions for a committee I'm on, and presentations. We had insightful conversations and brainstorming sessions on how to develop partnerships with local entrepreneurs and business schools to teach scientific entrepreneurship, presentations on easy ways to evaluate outreach sessions by asking volunteers at the session to fill out an exit survey, and furthered our planning for a few field experiences for undergraduate students. Additionally, I worked to create some presentation materials for two meetings regarding our modeling efforts, which included some nice figures showing how the data from our sources are represented in our work and how oyster health has changed in the Mississippi Sound from 2006-2019.

It is exceptionally quiet in the lab and will be for another week, since the semester doesn't start for another week+. It seems like the winter break at USM is longer than any other I've encountered, since the last day of Fall exams was December 12th and the semester doesn't start until after MLK Day. At FSU, for comparison, exams ended December 13th and classes started January 6th. I do think, though, that the faculty here may be grateful for this long(er) break, because the lack of teaching responsibilities in the interim means more time to catch up on writing reports, grant applications, meetings, and the other tasks that seem to pile up throughout the semester.

We are hoping to soon have all the data we need to start running the model, and then the real fun begins. While we (really Kim) have done a lot of work to make sure the model is balanced and will run smoothly, adding in the environmental variables from the physical modeling team can cause unforeseen consequences as the organisms interact with their environment. Then we will have to spend time pinpointing the problem and developing reasonable solutions. More on the model troubleshooting steps in a future blog, I'm sure.

Stay tuned for more updates as we close in on the start of model runs.