One Week More!

I'm really excited that I am one week closer to attending the Ocean Sciences Meeting 2024 in New Orleans with friends and colleagues from across the country. And tonight I put the finishing touches on my presentation. All presenters were asked to upload electronic versions of their posters to the community sharing page by tomorrow, and already there are so many published posters to look through. What I didn't realize was the additional accessibility that this program offers. Not only can viewers with visual impairments enlarge the text without adding pixelation, attendees can send messages directly to the poster author by clicking on a comment button, and presenters can add a tab to their poster that announces when they will have time to meet with attendees and when/where they will be presenting. These accessibility options represent a small step in the right direction for reducing and removing barriers to science communication. For me, these posters are an opportunity to view any research that I won't be able to see, either because of overlapping times or because I won't be around. While uploading an electronic version of our work is not required, I assume that many presenters have their materials ready, and the upload process is quite seamless, which should promote this additional step.

For class this week the students headed back out into the field to start their independent projects. They have a few weeks before they will present a formal proposal to the class about their research question, expected results, and experimental design. This presentation will represent their second of three, and allows us (the teaching faculty and staff) to identify any concerns regarding the experimental design and methods and allows us to provide additional feedback on oral presentations. In these few weeks, we encourage the students to test out questions they are interested in, try out methods, build equipment using materials we have, and figure out what will and won't work so that they are ready to go when the independent project time officially starts. We also encourage the students to find primary literature explaining some of the observations they've made and literature that can help shape their experimental methods, as we are not experts in all the animals they want to work with. I think that many of them are excited about the freedom they get in choosing a project and potential more so with the fact that temperatures will warm up throughout the semester, so when they go to start their projects in one month, the air might be 70+ degrees.

Next week I will hopefully get some good pictures of early experimental phases from the students' work, but for this week, here's a nice snapshot of the poster submission page minimized as small as possible. Even then, my computer couldn't fit more than eight posters on the screen at once. Can't wait. 

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