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J'ai réalisé une petite vidéo (<2min) sur les vers de terre pour laconférence de la Global Soil Biodiversity Initiative (GSBI) en Décembre 2014, Dijon, Fr. N'hésitez-pas à partager!
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I made a short video (<2min) on earthworms for theGlobal Soil Biodiversity Initiative (GSBI) conference in December 2014, Dijon, Fr. Feel free to share! First published on the INNGE Blog on Sept. 17th 2013. Since the official opening of INTECOL was set for Monday 19th, some participants could not be there the day before, on Sunday, for the first workshop of the 2013 conference in London, UK, organized by INNGE on “Emerging career opportunities for ecologists in the 21st century”. I really enjoyed it and now want to share a few of my notes from the two sessions I attended: “How to raise your profile” and “Planning a career in ecology”. The first part of the first session was very detailed on what (not) to write in a resume. Feel free to contact me if you want those details. Figure 1, below, shows the key points. The second part of the session was on the use of social media to manage our profiles as early-career scientists. Twitter proved to be the best and fastest way to raise our profile as young (or less-young) scientists. See Figure 1 for the main reasons why you should use it. Quite a few blog posts have already been published and aggregated on INNGE’s EcoBloggers that testify to the extensive use of Twitter at INTECOL. I was totally convinced and have opened my account since then. I was also convinced to try blogging, to share information not only with my peers, but also with a wider audience. Hopefully, we’ll see each other’s posts soon on EcoBloggers! Facebook and LinkedIn were less recommended as means to get jobs. People will certainly check your profile on these sites, but it will stop there, with a few exceptions. However, creating a professional page on Facebook seemed to work for some people, and I personally think that LinkedIn can still be interesting if you actively take part to conversations within specific groups–you might manage to get someone’s attention. The “plus” side of ResearchGate (RG) compared to LinkedIn is that it apparently facilitates interactions on topics of interest and researchers can upload their papers… that appear on Google Scholar! (see Twitter conversation between @tomezard, @LewisSpurgin and @cieronymidou on Sept 3). Academia.edu does the same but, from what I have read on the internet, it seems that it is less used than RG. The second session aimed to answer the question “How do you plan your career in ecology?”. To answer that question, Pr. Bill Sutherland (Uni. of Cambridge and BES Vice-president), Pr. Tim Coulson (Uni. of Oxford), Dr. Hazel Norman (Executive Director at BES), Laura Boggeln (Consultant in a private company and volunteering at INTECOL) and Dr. Barbara Anderson (Landcare Research, New Zealand, Rutherford Discovery Fellow) were present. Without further ado, the answer to that question is: You cannot plan your career. A couple of slides showed that most early-career ecologists see their life-career in academia, but only a small percentage of them actually stays in academia their whole life. Apparently, 50% of early-career scientists end up totally outside of science in the UK. Among the speakers, none of them had planned their path to where they are now. A common pattern was that they all explored outside of their fields - from birds to math, from plant to animal ecology, from academia to other research centers or small companies, or from New Zealand to the UK. They did not have any “coherent path”, but could identify common key features that determined it:
As it was pointed out, COMMUNICATION was clearly missing for Academia and Government!!!
We, researchers, are not known to be the best communicators… to the “outside world”. However, all week long, we have seen that researchers do know how to use tools like Twitter or Prezi. Those are tools that can greatly improve communication between researchers and other institutions. So it is a needed skill. Of course, it is also clear that we, researchers, also need to adapt our vocabulary to our audience, and need to know how to listen, to be sure that we talk about the same concepts… But this is another story… In the end, we were left with two questions to see to reflect on our coming path:
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