A funny thing happened on the way to the pandemic… In the summer of 2019 a colleague of mine, Dr. Peter Frederick – an expert in the wading birds of the Everglades – emailed me. Peter and I served on some university committees together, so I assumed we were just getting together to chat about changes in graduate student admissions or something else administrative.
Do you have a graduate degree and are looking for a job? The US Government hires thousands of people with your skill set. Here I’ll give a quick overview of the scope of those jobs. If you’re looking for the exhaustive guide for applying on USAjobs its here. Why should I work for the federal government? A career with a federal agency can be just as rewarding, and sometimes extremely similar, as a career in academia.
Authors: Shawn Taylor, Jessica Burnett This guide accompanies this post highlighting careers in the US Government. The US federal jobs site, USAJobs, is notoriously difficult to use. This guide aims to clarify much of the process and is geared towards biologists, ecologists, and other natural resources practitioners interested in working for the federal government. Especially in the agencies listed below.
Adjust expectations, be flexible, support your groups Research will be different from normal for a while and even in the best cases it will also be slower. The shift to working remotely will limit the kinds of work we can do and everyone doing research is experiencing a dramatic disturbance to their lives. This means the people in our labs will need flexibility and support.
Zoom works great: I’ve seen up to ~50 folks attending the talk remotely and slides with video. Everything connection wise worked well except for a single committee member with some minor freezing during the private defense. Have backup options: Give yourself time and backups in case things go wrong. Set up the connection early (15+ minutes) and ask the committee to show up early to check everything is working.
Understanding and managing forests is crucial to understanding and potentially mitigating the effects of climate change, invasive species, and shifting land use on natural systems and human society. However, collecting data on individual trees in the field is expensive and time consuming, which limits the scales at which this crucial data is collected.
PH.D STUDENT POSITION IN COMMUNITY ECOLOGY The Ernest Lab at the University of Florida has an opening for a Ph.D student interested in research in the area of community ecology, forecasting, and/or temporal dynamics to start fall 2020.
It’s not uncommon to hear stories of mistakes resulting in graduates students missing paychecks. This is a major problem because most students live month-to-month and can’t wait for a missed check to be fixed in the next pay cycle. Despite the commonness and dramatic impact of missed pay in graduate school*, it’s common to see these issues written off as isolated incidents and not part of a more systematic problem.
The weecology group is coming in force to the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America which is being held in New Orleans next week. We’ve been up to a quite diversified list of things over the past year ranging from temporal dynamics of communities to forecasting and remote sensing. We also have people involved in a number of outreach or training events this year.
We are excited to announce the first release of a new Julia package that let’s you run our Data Retriever software with a native Julia interface. For those of you not familiar with Julia it is a new programming language that is similar to R and Python, has a central focus on data analysis, and is designed from the ground up to be fast. It is an emerging scientific programming and data analysis language.
