Work it

Sep. 30th, 2014 08:55 pm
rebeccmeister: (Acromyrmex)
[personal profile] rebeccmeister
Kind of a boring day, but for a good cause. I got a request to review a highly pertinent manuscript on Sunday night, but I have a lot on my plate at the moment, so this morning I decided to bite the bullet and got the review turned in.

I'm also giving a lot of talks in the next couple of weeks, beginning on Friday. Friday's talk is mostly done - it's an introduction to the software program R for an emerging technologies engineering grad student group on campus. It will be interesting to see the engineers' first impressions. Giving what amounts to an hour-long marketing pitch can be kind of tough, but it should be enough time to leave the graduate students with a good idea as to whether or not R will be useful for them.

Next week, it's an hour-long departmental seminar at my brother's university (ahh, sweet, sweet nepotism). Leafcutter-focused. Hopefully I will wow them all with my beautiful photos, excellent fieldwork and lab experiments, and superb graphs.

After that, a talk at a Bio-Math meeting, where the audience will be mostly mathematicians, and where I won't be talking about much math. My main goal is to get some behavioral datasets in sufficiently good condition that I can explain how they're generated and the opportunities they present so as to give the mathematicians more ideas for mathematical models of leafcutter ant colonies and behavior.

I might also be giving a talk to people in my grad research group the Monday after the Bio-Math meeting, which may or may not be the same as the departmental seminar. And a week or two after that, I'll go up to Taylor, Texas, for another department seminar. Theoretically these two department seminars will be good practice for any job talks I get to give, although I think it's going to be a while (if ever) before I have any such opportunity. More than anything, I hope I can manage to be articulate and not make a complete fool of myself. I hope my audiences come away inspired.

Oh, and there's a conference in November. That talk with be cricket-focused.

I want to be working on manuscript revisions of the respirometry manuscript, and on the draft of the Discussion for the next leafcutter manuscript, and on the cricket longevity manuscript. Sometimes the writing is a real slog.

departmental seminar

Date: 2014-10-01 02:05 pm (UTC)
From: (Anonymous)
I've been enjoying the weekly Astronomy Colloquia at the UW for many years -- they're free and open to the public. And they serve coffee and cookies beforehand! Frequently the presenters are postdocs, and I have noted some who have been postdocs for up to ten years... The presentations are always polished, the fruit of having made numerous presentations.

I feel proud that you have been invited to present; I'm able to imagine the scene in my mind. I'd love to be at UCR next week, but, alas...

Love,
Dad

Re: departmental seminar

Date: 2014-10-01 02:44 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] rebeccmeister.livejournal.com
I am thinking about contacting people in the Nutritional Sciences Program at the UW to see about overlapping interests. They, too, have a weekly seminar series.

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