As I am clearly entering the last four months before giving in my Ph.D. thesis …
I crawl under an unprecedented amount of data and possible projects to put into papers. BUT, the summer 2016 was the perfect timing to present my recent findings at international conferences and I chose to attend The Ecological Society of America Annual Meeting in Fort Lauderdale (ESA2016).

Here I give you my advices when attending such big meetings:

• Field trips are awesome especially when you get to see alligators

• Arrive early to follow a workshop or organize one 

This year I was contacted by a fellow R instructor to help teach a workshop on How to build functions in R. It was a great experience and I definitely want to organize one myself in the future.

• Get involved as a volunteer

It was a great way to get involved and meet people from outside my specific field of research but I recommend making sure that you don’t miss a key session because of your involvement.

• Contribute to a section

This year I got involved in the Open Science Section. Since the beginning of my Ph.D., my director Steve Kembel has emphasized the importance of Open Science in our lab. We have published our first two papers in Open Access journal, with links to the data, metadata and code. I believe that making your science available improves its quality and holds you accountable to your work. “Open science is a no-barrier approach to scientific research.”

• Choose well your talk’s session

This year I was ambivalent between emphasizing the plant or microbial ecology parts of my talk. I ended up choosing to put the microbial ecology forward put after the meeting I reflected on it and decides I should have gone with plant ecology because the talks in this section were much more attended…

• Be bold, don’t be scared to ask questions, meet people and introduce yourself

Next year’s meeting is in Portland, and I definitely hope to be there!