About

Ideas and Ruminations

Figuring out what your interests are

It is never easy to look at the world and say "Here, that's exactly what I want to do." There are so many choices. When I graduated with my undergraduate degree, all I really knew is I didn't want to work with animals, and I loved ecology. Oh, but what a world that leaves open!

There are a several ways to go, and I tried all of them. The main thing I advocate is experience. Work in labs, work out of labs, volunteer to help with projects. If you are at the end of your baccalaureate and you don't know what you want to study, then go try something new. For myself, I got a research job for a year in a lab that I thought might be my interests. When I still wasn't sure, I joined the Peace Corps. While that may not be the route for everyone, the experience of something so very new helped me figure out what I really enjoyed. As it turns out, I love slogging around knee deep in wetlands. Who knew?

Experience doesn't have to just be work. It's life experience that helps people know what they love. Camping, traveling, meeting new people, all of these things are an integral part of finding a vocation which is also an avocation. And you don't have to figure it all out right away. Just keep trying new things until you have a clearer picture. One experience which helped me was to take a Post-baccalaureate course in a field I thought I might like. It turns out that many of the things I learned in that course I use today.

Finally, read the journal articles. Once you have an idea of what kind of research there is, you can start looking at which articles you really enjoy. Don't just look at the topics, though. Think about doing the research. Can you see yourself enjoying working in a lab? On a computer? In the field? This may sound silly on paper, but many ecologists choose the field in part because they really enjoy being outside.

Lab ecology vs field ecology

Don't let anyone fool you- ecology as a field is not constrained by scale. Much of what we know of populations came from the study of microbes, and there is still a great deal to do. Choosing between field and laboratory ecology is dicated more by the precise question that is asked than by topic.

Field ecology asks questions about in situ relationships, and can be done either experimentally (treatments and controls) or observationally.

Lab ecology asks about specific interactions or tries to predict the outcome given what we know about a particular system. Lab ecology is no longer resigned to petri dishes and counting bacteria. Lab ecology includes computer modeling- predictive ecology, so to speak.

Questions in field ecology include: Do red cockaded woodpeckers prefer old-growth forests? Does tree size or distance between trees matter more to red cocakded woodpeckers? Can we establish red cockaded woodpeckers in this forest if we change how we manage the forest?

Questions in lab ecology include: Can we predict red cockaded woodpecker population sizes given current land use trends? If we increase the amount of land in forest, do we increase red cockaded woodpecker numbers?

Modern ecology often includes components of both lab and field ecology. Observation studies, by themselves, are not as informative as observations coupled with an attempt to predict what happens in a changing world and vice versa.

Giving your first scientific talk

My first piece of advice is not to shy away from giving a talk. My second piece of advice- practice! In front of a mirror, video yourself, show it to your friends, your labmates, your neighbor, and anyone else you can rope in as an audience! The varying viewpoints you get will help you know where you're hitting the big pitfalls of any talk:

1. Ugly slides
Please, save me from this fate. Too much color, not enough color, too many bells and whistles, too many words, too small a font/photos, there are so many ways to make your slides distracting and frustrating for your audience.
Here are some good rules for preparing that first talk:

Keep your content font size 24 or more
Use a sans serif font
Keep the number of words to your slides to less than 50. Get rid of complete sentences unless you're really trying to emphasize a point. Break a slide into two if you have to.
Keep your background simple, and if you've got a photo for a background, don't add a photo to your slide (similarly, if you've got a plain background, add some photos- give your audience something to look at!)

2. Flat speaking style
You don't want to listen when someone is spekaing in a monodrone, right? So why would you expect anyone to want to listen to you? This is where practicing in front of a video camera is so helpful. Practice also helps you become comfortable enough to speak in a more 'normal' way- more like you would if in a conversation. Along those lines, don't read from a piece of paper- if you can't remember 15 or 20 minutes of a presentation, then your audience is better off reading the publication. Also, gesticulate! You've got hands and arms. If you want your audience engaged, then you need to look engaged.

3. Jargon
Let's be honest-- none of us are experts in every field of science. Assume your audience is smart enough to learn about whatever you're presenting on, but isn't familiar with the lingo. Get rid of acronyms while you're at it (although they're fine on slides), unless everyone knows what you're talking about (like USA).

The next big difficulty is content. Your best bet is to go from the broad topic to the specifics over the course of your talk.

A Pet Peeve:
Don't give me a slide with an outline of your talk after your title slide. On your title slide, with your very well thought-out title, go ahead and give me the overview (i.e.: Today I will be discussing a project where we looked at the nutrient concentrations of Everglades soils. I hope to convince you by the end of this talk that phosphorus is a key nutrient in this system.) But please, please, please, don't give me a bullet list of the chapters of your talk. Yuck!

That aside, a picture or diagram is worth a thousand words. Rather than try to explain the theories on your slides in words, take the time to make a diagram which you can then walk your audeince through. Not only will your audience appreciate and understand your efforts more, you are less likely to loose your place when working with a good diagram. The same goes for sampling methods and your results.

Give yourself about 45 seconds to a minute per slide- that way you won't go over your time allotment (and no one ever enjoys a talk longer than it was supposed to be, although they frequently enjoy talks shorter than the time limit!)

If you need to trim a talk down, take a good look at your methods section. Are you talking about new or novel ways to do sampling? If not, you can probably reduce your methods section to 2 or 3 slides.

Recap the main ideas at the end of your talk, so that your audience leaves remembering the reason why they went to your talk.

Acknowledge who helped you with your research and where your funding came from. This can be done either up front or at the end of your talk, but to do otherwise may offend some people whom you really need to keep happy!

Finally, don't be worried about flubbing a little in your talk. Everyone has a story about making a mistake in a talk (ask me about giving a talk while taking cold medicine!) Just do your best; your audience is forgiving of everything except boredom and lying!

And for the more experienced talk givers:
The Truth Is, You Gave a Lousy Talk by Tory Defoe