Traveling overseas for a conference, KBS grad student finds a ‘small world’

During my winter break last month, I was able to attend the British Ecology Society Conference in Edinburgh, Scotland. This was my first science conference and first scientific poster presentation, and it was only possible due to multiple sources of funding.

I was supported by the T. Wayne and Kathryn Porter Graduate Fellowship Endowment Fund from the W.K. Kellogg Biological Station—KBS —as well as travel funds from Michigan State University’s Department of Integrative Biology; the Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior program, or EEB, Professional Horizons Grant; and the Graduate School travel funds. All of these sources greatly helped minimize the financial impact that an international conference trip like this can have, on top of the preparation for the conference itself.

Preparation eased the conference experience

Working up to the conference, I presented my research at both a KBS colloquium and an EEB data colloquium. The feedback from peers and professors really helped in the analysis, communication, and portrayal of my research and results. While the buildup and anticipation of a poster presentation was overwhelming, from research to printing the poster, the session itself went a lot smoother than expected.

There were so many attendees presenting posters at this conference: I had never seen so many scientists in one place. On the third night of the conference, the second poster session night, in one of three rooms with about 100 students presenting in each, I stood eagerly by my poster. In a room full of every type of ecologist, I thought the odds of someone being interested in the exact topic of my poster were pretty low. However, the few interactions in the following hour and a half proved beneficial for my experience at the conference and my further research.

KBS connections

The first person who asked about my poster turned out to actually be a former KBS summer program graduate student, now a lecturer in England. As a graduate student from Indiana, she came up to KBS for a summer statistics course led by Dr. Chris Klausmeier, who just happens to be on my committee. This “small world” connection helped me relax for the remainder of the poster session.

After some smaller conversations, another graduate student came excitedly up to my poster asking about my experience rearing Pieris butterflies, such as the Cabbage White butterflies I study. We talked for some time about our methods in raising caterpillars and setting suitable environments for the adults to mate. A while later the poster session was over, and it was time to take down my poster. The stressful part was over.

By the end of the conference, I had made a connection with a professor whose lab was doing very similar research to mine. I have since been emailing her graduate student, talking about our research methods. I suspect that these connections I made and the experiences I had at this conference will help me greatly in the remainder of my time at MSU and beyond. This would not have been possible without financial support and research support from my peers.

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Sam Stynen is a graduate student in MSU’s Department of Integrative Biology, the Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior program, and at Kellogg Biological Station in the Haddad Lab.
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