Summer Already?

I know that it may be shocking to some, but summer is here (mostly) for the university. Friday marks the last day of classes of the spring semester, and exams are next week, with graduation following shortly. What does summer look like for me? Well, unlike this previous summer, I won't be job hunting on a daily basis, but will in fact be continuing ecosystem modeling research in the lab. For many graduate students and some faculty, the summer means a field season, where there is ample time for conducting longer term experiments or planning multiple research expeditions across one, two, or sometimes three months. Additionally, for some students, this will mark their first field season of their graduate experience, so this will likely be a learning experience for many.

Our lab does not have ongoing laboratory or field research to manage so this summer we will continue work as usual but with more focus on finalizing results and writing reports. We will also spend some time at science conferences, between the State of the Coast conference in a few weeks and the national American Fisheries Society (AFS) meeting in San Antonio, Texas, this August. At some point, Kim and I will also hear about submissions for the CERF 2025 conference, as we will go through and organize speakers for our session on freshwater inflow, along with Jessica, another postdoc at GCRL. Our role here, is to manage the amount of time we are given by the science program organizers and Tetris together a session across oral and poster presentations. While we were initially informed to keep early May open for this process, Kim believes that we won't get any information until later this summer, as the science program organizers will need to go through all the abstract submissions, organize and make some decisions, and then pass this information on to the session chairs/conveners.

It will surely be an exciting and likely busy summer getting all these projects organized, writing, and preparing to present or presenting findings. Can't wait to take you along with me for the summer series of blogs, which I will still be posting on a weekly basis. Stay tuned.