Post 54: Smithers, Weddings, Refocusing and Goal-Setting Again

I had the better part of last week trying to settle back down in Victoria and organizing myself before taking off for a wedding in Smithers. In part I succeeded: I found a rhythm in the bird calls outside my office on campus, caught smiles in my conversation with colleagues I haven't seen or been in touch with (it's nice to be missed!), and got lost for a couple of hours of writing in my fourth chapter again.

That feeling: losing sense of time as the focus requires ignoring everything else around, is addictive. I remember it well from undergrad paper and short-story writing. It's always the first 10 or 15 minutes of fidgety, uneasy mental calming that needs to happen in order to sink into the writing that's the hardest.

So I left last week on a high note, even as I was readying myself for a short trip—my first—to Smithers, BC, for a long-time friend's wedding.

Leaving Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands; sunrise, approximately 5:35AM. 

A lot of the flight up was catching the views of the Coast Mountains and their melting glaciers. See the edges,
the height this long-tongued glacier used to have?

Smithers was incredible!!! I truly fell in love with this little northern city. It's a little bit sprawl-y, but with the wide open Bulkley Valley to inhabit, I can understand why development patterns took shape as they did. There is no pressure to condense, unlike in the steep mountain valleys of the Kootenays, where there is little flat space to build. My friend Rory and his parents Marj and John were fantastic hosts, showing me around town, and just generally making me feel very welcome. Staying with someone who really loves and knows their own city is probably the best way to quickly get a decent sense of it in such a short amount of time. I think this is why I don't make a good tourist-traveller in places I've never been to. I long for that sense of connection that's hard to find otherwise! I always feel like I'm on the outside of a museum, looking in at the colours and images and attractions, but there's a window in the way.

I went on a lovely half-day hike with a new friend, Lisa, who I'd met years ago through the bride, and it was really great to hike with someone whose pace was compatible with mine. We pushed ourselves really hard to get up into the alpine of the Babine Provincial Park, and we just made it before we had to turn around to try to meet the time constraint we were under. We snapped a few photos of alpine plants at the top, too! I was enchanted by the variety of colour and species of the Indian paintbrush (Castilleja sp.) all the way up.

Heading to the trail parking lot, we bumped into this mottled little fox that had been playing on the dirt road. Here it is scampering off as we neared it. 

I also learned about the blue alpine geranium (Geranium sp.); the friend I stayed with lent me a field guide and we pulled it out a few times to find new plants.

The Geranium (L) and a yellow aster (Aster sp.)(R) with a little fly!

I love the crinkly white flowers of the Thimbleberry (Rubus parviflorus), the fruit of which is one of my favourite berries.

View from the alpine we'd broken into. 

   
 One of the pale yellow Indian paintbrushes.                                             My hiking buddy, Lisa! 

And then the wedding took place at Camp Caledonia, right on Tyhee Lake. What a gorgeous spot! It was perfectly suited for the wedding, the weather cooperated, and I made several new friends. This will not be the first-and-last time that I will have visited.

Lake Tyhee! 

Lisa and I at the wedding. 

Academically, I also got some work done between the hike and playing cribbage and the wedding; I'd committed to writing a peer-review for an undergraduate paper that was submitted to The Arbutus Review. It felt great to sink into that for a few hours, reflect on what's working well, and where the paper could be improved. It was a very well-written paper, and a pleasure to read because of that, which made my job easier. Bonne chance! to the student; publishing is very fun!

Now it's back to breaking down the different chapter sections, laying out headings, and organizing themes, and ultimately, finishing a draft of this chapter in the next few weeks!

Post 53: Back in Victoria!

Phew! It's been a very busy last month and a half for me. Travel to two conferences, covering my parents' vacation, and finishing up last week at the BC FoodPro West Conference with my sister, dad, and my family's Sales Representative Laura, was quite a feat!

Quick good news story: my parents have had a sourdough bread bakery (the Kaslo Sourdough Bakery) for about 23+ years now, and 2 years ago they started to produce sourdough pasta (Kaslo Sourdough Pasta, or KSP), which is amazing!!! The judges that evaluated the Innovation Award and Product of the Year must have thought so too, because KSP took the Innovation Award and got bronze for Product of the Year!!! Now I'm even more proud of them than I was before! The BCFPA had awesome videos of the nominees, and once they're up, I'll be able to share the one they made of KSP. My dad's voice sounds a little bit funny in the video because he was just getting it back after having tonsillitis! In any case, a SUPER BIG CONGRATS to them! They are so awesome. Here's us at the gala, post-award:

That's me on the left, my dad Silvio beside me, my sister Heidi in the blue dress, and Laura on the right!

(For those wondering why I'm in the photo, too: I am their sales representative here in Victoria, and sometimes do demos on the road for them, too.)

I am, however, glad to be back in Victoria and sinking my teeth into thesis work, and seeing my colleagues again. I have missed them, and there are some lovely changes around University House 4, too.

We have a picnic table!! I sat out on it yesterday doing some work already. Today it's a bit grey and clouded over, but maybe it'll still be a great lunch spot. :)

This morning I've already said hi to Mary, Mike, and Kristen, who came in yesterday to get some prep work and organizing done for Mary and Kristen's time in the field starting mid-July.

And after appreciating the lovely yellow blossoms of St. John's Wort (Hypericum perforatum) in the front of the building, I was reminded just how different plants can look in one location and another!! Local climatic and environmental conditions obviously play a significant role in all of this. To illustrate my point:

Victoria's version of St. John's Wort: lush, succulent, huge flowers, big leaves. 

This gives a better picture of the full plant. 

Whereas in the Kootenays where I'm from, with it's much shorter growing season, I'm used to the St. John's Wort looking more like this: 

The scraggly, smaller flowered and leaved St. John's Wort of the Kootenays. 

I almost didn't believe that they were the same plant. BUT -- this reminds of the research project that I undertook with my group during the Redfish School of Change Field School that I participated in; at the time, we visited three different biogeoclimatic zones in BC: the one my hometown is a part of in the south-eastern corner of the province, the Interior Cedar Hemlock zone, the lower mainland's Coastal Western Hemlock, and on Vancouver Island here in Victoria, the Coastal Douglas Fir Zone. We tracked red-osier dogwood (Cornus stolonifera) in each of those zones, measuring some of the key physical features of the plant, and were startled to see a HUGE difference: in the Kootenays they were bushes, whereas on the Island they were trees! (We did not, unfortunately, have the capacity at the time to check out soil or water chemistry properties, so limited our research to the physical factors).

The St. John's Wort and red-osier dogwood are good examples that I'll keep in mind to share with students in the future on something like the plant walks that I have done for ES 341 or Ecological Restoration, or ES 200, the introductory course. As I tell them there: "Never trust a plant!"

Post 52: Charlottetown, Climate Change, and the East Coast!

I was lucky enough to be able to attend the Climate Change in Culture Conference put on by the fantastic group at the University of Prince Edward Island (UPI). What a phenomenal conference!! And three cheers to Dr. John McIntyre and his co-star Jordan McIntyre -- it was a delight to be greeted in person, by name, at the conference registration table, and while I didn't see John's presentation, I was immensely intrigued by Jordan's, which covered "The 'Scandal' of Climate Science." 

Bit of background (just in case this is new news for some): since September of last year I've been working part time as a research assistant for a climate change and adaptation project led by Dr. Johanna Wolf. Partly for experience, definitely for interest and concern, and partly for helping to keep me in Victoria while I finish up my mountain pine beetle thesis. 

Our project budget allows for sending us to a couple of conferences, and Charlottetown was the first that we went to to present some of our preliminary findings!! SO MUCH FUN! I really loved and appreciated the collaborative building of the presentation with Johanna as we prepared for the conference, even if it had us making edits after 9PM when we should be getting ready for bed after a long day of travel! :) But such is the nature of the work sometimes. 

One thing I did not expect: the challenge of the timezone difference! PEI is 4 hours ahead of BC. So when it's 10 PM in Charlottetown, it's 6PM in Kaslo. And my body was not able to adjust to a reasonable bedtime because my internal clock was not having it! So I had several nights of 2AM because I couldn't fall asleep. I ended up getting a chest cold after the conference that's still clearing up, and between the hours of sitting, perhaps not eating as much or as well as I usually do, and the stress and excitement of the conference, my immune system was down for a bit. Whammo: enter the chest cold! Ah well. It is definitely easier going west with the timezones than it is going east. 

The Parliamentary buildings in Charlottetown!

And for the first time I met an academic that I was super excited to meet -- Dr. Andrew Light! He was one of three keynote speakers. I had read some of his older work, and he was an author in the Novel Ecosystems textbook that I've had my nose in for about 2 years now.  A philosopher by trade, he's on leave to serve as a Senior Adviser to the Special Envoy on Climate Change in the US Department of State. The talk he gave really put into perspective for me what we can expect of the climate negotiations later this year in Paris later this year. I feel slightly less pessimistic about the prospect of countries getting their act together to address climate change (both mitigation and adaptation) in light of the heavy-weight institutional infrastructures that need moving in order to get that action going, before we're really committed to serious warming beyond 2 degrees Celsius. 

So much love for the colourful houses in PEI! 

The presentations were fantastic, the topics wide-ranging and interesting, and I definitely feel like my brain got stretch in a really pleasant way. What really struck me after listening to presentations for several days, was how different the presentation formats were. I'm not saying one was necessarily better than the other, but I was surprised by how many people read out their papers, as opposed to focused on standing-up-with-a-slideshow-and-presenting-their-material-that-way that I've come to expect. While all the presentations were quite good, I found the read-aloud presentations were more difficult to engage with, and lacked slides for some of the basic things such as the names of the people they were talking about. I suppose that is feedback that I'd give some of the presenters, especially because this was a multi-disciplinary conference, and as some with social science training, I found this to be a barrier to fully enjoying and maximizing my understanding and engagement with some of the presentations outside of my discipline. As well, I feel it would only be fair to acknowledge that I am a visual learner, too, and so am definitely someone who benefits from both seeing content and hearing it. 

Conference Field Trip!! 

We had one, and it was fantastic, and it really brought home for me how different climate change is affecting both the east and west coasts of Canada, and how much warmer the Atlantic ocean is than the Pacific. 

PEI is an island made mostly of softer materials: sand and limestone. It's already experience a fairly significant amount of shoreline erosion; one local and well-known story that Erin Taylor ( Department of Environment, Labour and Justice, Government of PEI) mentioned during her talk (fantastic panel on Climate Change, Land Use, and Planning on PEI) was of a resident who still pays about a dollar a year in property tax on the 99% flooded lot that he still owns, which has been in his family for a while. But it is gone! It's underwater! Only a corner of it remains. 

PEI and Charlottetown apparently had a significant scare with Hurricane Sandy a few years ago; early projections for the path of the hurricane had it set right for the middle of PEI, and the storm surges would have been massive! Hope Parnham (Dv8 Consulting), another presenter, shared that this is when the city really woke up to realizing how under-prepared it was to deal with some of the extreme events that Charlottetown can expect in a climate changed world. [[Sidenote: It's not that the numbers of hurricanes are increasing, but that their paths of travel are changing: they're heading further poleward, as seen with Sandy, and their intensity is increasing (thanks for the science brief PCIC!!). Sandy fortunately changed it's trajectory a bit, and was downscaled to a tropical storm by the time it hit Charlottetown.]] It was fortunate that Hope was able to pull together some of the recent work she and other had been doing to get some really quick progress done with the municipalities and government to think about and through what it meant to prepare for climate change. 

So with all of that in mind, we headed for a beach walk, led by the local climatologist Dr. Adam Fenech. We boarded the bus to Greenwich, and half an hour later, ended up at the North Shore of PEI! The beach looked like this, and it was spectacular: 

Warm winds, talks of bees and farmers with a fellow conference-goer on this red-sand beach; deee-lightful! 

The winds were warm, the company was excellent, and I really fell in love with the Island. I bumped into Dr. Roger Wheate from the University of Northern British Columbia who I'd met at the Thinking Mountains Conference in Jasper only 3 weeks earlier (so heartwarming! Many hugs!). I also bonded with Dr. Laurie Brinklow during that walk as well,  who kindly shared her book of poetry with me (I'm currently reading and enjoying it!). Hers was the first story I'd heard of someone from out west and in British Columbia that went east, stepped onto PEI, and said "This is home." I'm used to hearing stories happen the other way around! 

Charlottetown is a wonderful small city. I stayed in a hotel right on the harbour-front, could walk up the downtown main streets that there were, and in retrospect I'm amazed that it's a city of about 35,000! It didn't feel like it at all. And everyone was friendly and kind and helpful when I needed a hand with directions. The buildings are similar to what they are on the UVic campus: few tower about tree height, so everything feels nicely on an engaging human scale. 

The Charlottetown waterfront, though my view was slightly different, and sans the cruise ships. 

I definitely wish I'd had more time to explore and take in the city. Many thanks for the meals shared, conversations talked, and thoughtful engagement with a number of others at the conference. I almost got to meet everyone, and it was very, very rewarding to do so.

Short note: unfortunately my phone battery died, and as it was my main source of photo-taking, I will need to post some of the few photos I snapped later when I get the new battery mailed to me. The photos I used on this page are sourced thanks to the Internet! 

Post 51: Being home in the Kootenays!

Home is a magical place.

Kaslo, my tiny hometown, population around 1000 (it fluctuates during the year with the quietest point in the winter, and the bustle returning for summer), is—surprise!—the largest community on the main body of Kootenay Lake (Destination BC).

Being home for me means working in the bakery that my parents have been running for the last 23+ years and waking up to the smell of fresh, baking bread filling the house, as the bakery is attached to it; it means regular visits and card games and spending time in the our massive garden with my grandparents, because we share a backyard with them and the garden is my grandpa's main project right now; it means taking the dog for walks along the Kaslo River Trail, a visionary project that my dad set in motion; it means winks out at star-filled skies before climbing under sheets, and relatedly, quiet nights with amazing sleeps; it means spending time with my family and my siblings and their significant others.

My awesome grandparents celebrating my grandma's 80th birthday! 

And sometimes it means spending an afternoon filling the table with apple peels and flour because we know that my mom loves apple pie:

My sister Heidi (R) with her fiancee Peter (L), and our mess on the table. :) 

Being home means a lot of things to me, including mountain adventures, a general sense of things are all right in the world.

It also frequently means a lot of work, haha, so my sister and I spent a lot of time organizing things, and dusting and taking care of the chickens and the dog, and weeding, and other such fun things which I've really been enjoying these past few weeks.

View from the Public Beach, North. We're in the Selkirk Mountains; the Purcells are across the lake to the right.

While I brought home my StandStand, I've found it more fruitful for now just to stand and do some of the research work that I brought home with me at the kitchen's island counter, but all of the running up and down stairs and garden work and walking with the dog have reinforced for me that I feel much better when I'm switching things up as opposed to hunkering down in a chair for 7+ hours a day. So I will definitely need to remember that when I get back to Victoria!!

Here are a couple other pictures of home so far:

Pebble Beach, one of my favourite little corners.  

Giant tulip in the garden. 

The garden slowly taking shape!

 And then of course there is the fun and wild madness of the Kaslo May Days: a long-standing tradition. Every kid who's a kid in Kaslo needs to participate in the maypole dance (which I wasn't able to attend because we were baking.) But I did catch some of the fun of the choker race:

And here's an action shot of the women's log rolling competition!

Home is a good many things, but many things aren't as good as home. 

And now off to the Climate Change in Culture Conference in Charlottetown! 

Post 50: Thinking Mountains Conference Recap

The Thinking Mountains conference held in Jasper, Alberta from May 5th - May 8th was one of the most fun conferences I've been to.

The size (around a hundred?) was perfect for getting to know almost everyone I'd wanted to (at times the conversations among other delegates were so engaged that I missed talking to two people I'd wanted to say hello to!), the venue and food were fantastic, and the mountains surrounding Jasper made for more than a fitting locale for the conference. The weather held up, too! It was great for the majority of the conference, and we delivered a successful Mountain Legacy field trip and managed almost all of the photos at the Old Fort Hill station as part of a Morrison P. Bridgland survey.

A photo that the talented Mary Sanseverino took of us at the field trip with our group! It can be found on her Flikr here.

What a great bunch, and what a fun afternoon! In the image above, Mary transposed the historical survey photo (in black and white) onto the modern with us in front.

So this was also my first conference with almost my whole lab group, and that made it really special. How lovely to wring hands and sip water nervously in the company of my colleagues while waiting for my turn during our panel. My supervisor did a great job of setting us up with the intro of the panel (about 20 minutes), then each of us had about 15 minutes to speak, each. And everyone did so darn good!! I was really humbled by how good the presentations were! 

I felt really great (though still a bit terrified) after completing my own presentation, but boy was I glad that our presentations were right on the first day of the conference. I would have had a difficult time of enjoying it otherwise, I think, though now I know more of what to expect in the future. Not only did I feel really good afterwards, and I am so grateful for all the TAing experience, because holding lectures/facilitating discussions for an hour at a time made me several degrees more comfortable during the talk, but it did feel like an accomplishment. 

Lovely spring lilac! 

On top of that, what I couldn't have expected was the delight and surprise that I experienced when several people came up to me afterwards to say, "Great presentation!" That felt very good, too. 

I was very sad after the conference was over, and it was very bittersweet to part ways with my colleagues right away. They were taking on a long road trip back to Victoria, and I was on my way back home to Kaslo, BC, where I spent the next 2.5 weeks, covering my parents' first big joint vacation in 27 years! 

Gaining the experience from the conference was so valuable. I highly recommend the experience for all grad students. There are different conferences for different stages of where you're at in your degree, too; a conference such as CONFORWest (finished for this year) is specifically for graduate students, and would be an awesome place to get that first conference experience.

Post 49: "Thinking Mountains" and Conference Presentations -- a Flurry of Action in Jasper, AB

I'm presenting at the "Thinking Mountains" Conference in Jasper this week with my lab group, and I'll write a longer post when I'm done later this afternoon. For now, I'm all nerves and rehearsing my own presentation, at the cost of missing some of the conference this morning.

Oh, being an introvert and needing to feel really really really ready before public speaking!! I'm sure everyone including me will be relieved when our panel is finished later this afternoon.

Here are several photos from the drive up along the Icefields Parkway, from Banff to Jasper, though. Simply an amazing landscape:

It had been snowing just before we stopped.... 

At a pullout with a few others, marvelling at the landscape, catching some late sunshine. 

Snow snow snow! :)

Taking a 'short cut' according to my GPS... we waited almost 10 minutes for the train to go by. 

Right in the middle of Jasper! An elk! 

After a late arrival last night, and jumping into an evening reception with other conference participants, here's a cheers to enjoying the rest of it!

Post 48: Collaboration, Collaboration, Collaboration, and an Amazing Novel Ecosystems Panel Discussion!

Last week I was looking through my emails and saw an invite to a Novel Ecosystems Panel discussion that was organized by one of the PhD students in our department, Nancy Shackleford (who just passed her comprehensive exams, CONGRATS!), on seemingly very short notice. During her discussion with my lab group when she was our guest a number of weeks ago, she'd mentioned collaboration and pulling together different people, and this seemed to be one of those great circumstances!

We have two wonderful guests here right now: Dr. Rachel Standish from the University of Western (UWA) Australia, who is on Nancy's committee, and Dr. Richard Hobbs also from UWA and most recently became a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science (which is a big deal!). Richard was also Nancy's master's supervisor. Both are visiting from Australia. And both were on this panel to discuss reflections on the novel ecosystems concept that both have written on with my supervisor, Dr. Eric Higgs, since the novel ecosystems book came out in 2013: Novel Ecosystems: Intervening in the New Ecological World Order. The book was co-edited by Richard, Eric and Carol Hall.

What I really loved afterwards about what turned out to be an awesome panel discussion was the format: 15 minutes per speaker, followed by 10 minutes of general questions, then a short break for filling up with cheese and fresh cut fruit, and then pods of discussions around the small sets of tables that were distributed around the room, with Eric, Rachel, and Richard visiting each of the different tables.

More tulips from the Vancouver Easter long weekend! :) 

It was excellent! And what a diversity of contributions from each of the panelists: Richard started off by discussing some of the history of the concept, starting with F. Stuart Chapin III and Anthony Starfield, and Peter Bridgewater who were writing on synthetic and emerging ecosystems in the 1980s, to explaining how he got involved with the concept, to publishing the novel ecosystems book with Eric in 2013, and some of the criticisms and responses that have taken place since. He is a great storyteller, and definitely kept us laughing as he walked us through this brief history.

Rachel also reflected on her initial motivation to get involved with the concept, which included her usual pragmatism around "Will it be helpful?" Her answer to the question included a qualified yes, as she could think of at least 2 types of ecosystems in which she thought it had direct application: degraded landscapes such as those she has studied in the Australian wheat belt, and urban landscapes. She wrapped up with a few reflections on where work on the concept could go next, including more work to try to define/understand thresholds for ecosystems and ecosystem states, and wondering about novelty in terms of changing phenological shifts for plants, due to climate change, and mismatches in species because of that.

Some of the fantastic flowering red currant, Ribes sanguineum, on campus!  

Eric covered a lot of territory very quickly, but it was very, very good. He spent his first few minutes emphasizing the three components of the novel ecosystems definition that are really key to the concept: difference in ecological function or composition from historical configurations, some threshold having been passed because of the changes, and a demonstrated self-persistence of the ecosystem.

He emphasized the third aspect, the persistence of the novel ecosystem, because without that, you have designed or engineered ecosystems, requiring a lot of constant inputs and efforts to keep it going. This isn't to say that an engineered ecosystems can't later become a novel one, but at least right at the beginning, it won't be a novel ecosystem because it lacks that self-persistence on its own. And it's important to emphasize this so as to curtail arguments that all designed ecosystems (including and especially those that appear post-mining restoration) are novel ecosystems. They are not.

Each of the panelists mentioned some of the controversy that's been going on about the concept. The early  2006 paper that is really one of the most prominent on the concept "Novel ecosystems: theoretical and management aspects of the new ecological world order," co-authored by 15 others, was well received when it came out. And the 2009 paper, "Novel ecosystems: implications for conservation and restoration," written by Richard, Eric, and another colleague James Harris from Cranfield Univesity, was also well-received. So Richard was sort of reflecting on why it was that now some people in restoration and conservation are becoming very alarmed by the concept. Some of those concerns are well grounded, but others seem to be (to me), founded in fear and a lack of inner adaptability for change. Our ecosystems are experiencing rapid ecological changes. Period. The novel ecosystems concept, as Eric and others have pointed out, does not diminish the reality of the changes that conservationists, biologists, and restoration practitioners have been noticing.

More lovely tulips, even when they're close to being spent!

I find that one of the most useful functions of the novel ecosystems concept is that it opens up that questions of "Should we intervene in an ecosystem?" and accompanying that, "What are our options and priorities?" Frequently, restoration and conservation projects take place within very well-defined budgets. If you have 1.3 million dollars to spend on a region in a given year, is it better to spend it on one site/ecosystem that has a LOT of invasive species, associated soil and chemical changes that mean that restoration will be extremely difficult and success is uncertain, or spend that budget on smaller projects that have less degradation or less invasion, and a much higher chance of success? Towards the end of the discussion at our table Eric sort of joked that he thinks we're entering the "Age of Deliberation", where we're doing to be having long arguments and discussions about all of these questions and more.

***

It's that time of year and three thesis defenses are happening tomorrow!! Congrats to Anita Girvan, our wonderful TAC, who is defending Friday morning, and to two of my colleagues, Nikki Heim and Meg Sullivan! What wonderful news, though I'm frustrated about the overlapping booking for Nikki and Meg's defenses; I'll need to choose which one to attend!

Post 47: Guest Post on Teaching from Garrett Richards!

Three weeks ago we had a lab meeting during which Garrett Richards was one of two guests, and we ran out of time to discuss his perspectives on transitioning into teaching, which I had been particularly interested in hearing about. Garrett is one of those wonderfully reflective people who produces excellent work all the time, because of his unending internal processes of introspection and thoughtfulness. Because of this, he's delightful to work with, and he follows up when he says he'll do something with/for you. He's currently in Saskatoon finishing writing his PhD and teaching sessionally.

Garrett generously emailed me after the meeting with these additional thoughts, which we didn't get to talk about during the lab meeting (it already went over time). So, from Garrett:

1) Obviously teaching is something to consider a little later in your graduate career. I don't know of many sessionals without a master's degree, and it seems to be a minimum requirement on any posting. Still, if you're interested in pursuing teaching, it's something to start thinking about even at the end of your master's, even if you won't teach for another few years. Some PhD programs, for instance, have a mandatory teaching component (e.g. after your classes and comprehensive exams you might spend one term teaching a course coordinated by your department) that might be attractive to you.

First apple tree blossoms I've found on campus! Love the splashes of pink through the white petals! 

2) Sessional teaching is super unreliable. In any given term, the courses you are able to teach (and want to teach) might not be available. At the University of Saskatchewan (UofS), one tricky thing about this is that ALL sessional opportunities get posted to the public, even if a department already suspects they will fill them with their regular sessional instructors. 

So you need to apply to a lot of them, but some are not even "real" postings. I didn't have that problem applying at UVic (not that I ended up teaching there), but it was a lot harder to find the postings to begin with. If the university where you end up doesn't have a convenient regular posting for all sessional positions like the UofS, email the department(s) you're interested in and ask how to be kept in the loop. Anyway, demand for completely new sessionals seems to be low, so don't plan on getting an appointment right away - apply for a few different terms and hopefully you'll stumble into a class that a new instructor has a chance at getting. Then you'll have some experience and connections, which might open up further opportunities.

3) Of course, if you manage to get a permanent appointment in some department (i.e. based on your research), the teaching doors may fly open, even if you don't have any teaching experience.

4) Teaching is a lot of work, and takes up a lot of mental space (especially if you're teaching in an area outside your research focus). Most graduate students will already be familiar with these challenges from TAing. Actually teaching a class is way more fun (i.e. you actually get to make decisions about what material to cover and what assignments to give) but quite a bit more work. I'm lucky to have a lot of public speaking experience, such that I don't have to write super-detailed notes for each lecture (I use my slides to guide me and just a few extra notes written on paper). 

And some latecomer cherry blossoms. The first started blooming in February, and now it's mid-April! Lovely!

I've heard a piece of advice that you shouldn't teach until you've drafted at least two chapters of your dissertation. Still, splitting your focus between teaching and writing is hard - I try to devote entire days to one or the other. I would expect to do 3-days-teaching and 2-days-writing each week for a big class, and the inverse for a small one (once you get into a rhythm). 2 new classes at once would probably take all your time, but I assume things get way easier when teaching a class a subsequent time.

5) Be proactive in asking questions to someone in the department. They may not plan on doing a lot of hand-holding, and you should feel free to do a lot independently, but there are some things you will need guidance with (just like when TAing). For my first appointment, I was a bit surprised at how little information I was given - I sent an email back with about 20 questions (e.g. Is there marking assistance? Where will my office space be? How much can I change from the existing syllabi? How do I access online parts of the course? Do I need to ask the bookstore to order textbooks for my students? et cetera). It's a bit tricky to balance guidance vs. independence - I overdid the independence a little bit in my first class and should have gotten someone to check over the mid-term I had developed before giving it to my class (i.e. it was too hard).

Thanks Garrett!! 

Post 46: Lab Meeting Guests, and Normalizing the Grad School Experience

This post has been brewing in my mind for a while, and now that I'm mostly over my flu (caught early last week on the Easter long weekend!), and TAing has wrapped up, I can engage in this space a little bit more again. In many ways this semester turned out to be much busier than I could have imagined it to become at the beginning of January. I knew I was staring down TAing a very big class with multiple tutorials, that I'd be trying to write a lot of my thesis, and that I would be keeping up with my hours for my second research project. At some point in those early weeks of the semester myself and my colleague Tanya took on the role of organizing our weekly lab meetings, too, and we set out on an ambitious schedule.

Due to difficulties with our technological setup at University House 4 (we didn't have a video-conferencing set-up, nor did we have functional space with a big screen to effectively share work or demo programs or such), our schedule was flexibly modified as the semester chugged along. Still, we included a good variety of meetings, from a discussion on short scientific presentation skills, to prep and planning for a conference many of us are attending in early May called Thinking Mountains, to overviews of Weebly (website development), Scrivener (a composition program), and Papers (citation program that plays well with Scrivener), student presentations and catch-ups, and a variety of guests, mostly PhD students, a post-doc student, and a visiting scholar from Australia.

Walking in the land of tulips! Makes me think of the tulip mania that took over the Netherlands during the 1600s. 

For the meetings with guests, I was particularly keen on hearing about their experiences during their graduate degrees, because in the recent months I have found it incredibly useful and wonderful and important to help me deal with the impostor syndrome, anxieties, and other concerns about graduate school. I've found that the more I hear stories about people experiences—good and challenging—about making it through grad school, the more I've gained perspective, built bonds with those colleagues, and found a way to really enjoy my experience all the more. In short, it's been a really useful way to normalize a lot of the experiences of going through this program, and it's been simply wonderful to make more connections and deepen my understanding of the graduate school.

So on top of asking about their current research projects, Tanya and I asked about what the most valuable advice was that each of them had received during their graduate experience, major roadblocks they'd encountered and how they overcame them, what formative experiences led them to carry on to do PhDs or further, and what they recommend for managing relationships with their research communities, including their committees and supervisors. For a couple of the later ones we also asked questions about the differences between PhD students and post-docs, and about experiences with transitioning into sessional teaching (this will be an upcoming guest post). Our guests included Frances Stewart, Christy James, Nancy Shackleford, Liese Coulter, Garrett Richards, Kira Hoffmann, and Jonaki Bhattacharyya.


Because there were so many of them—it's a shame that I didn't have more time to write on each closer to when they happened—and because I got too wrapped up in enjoying the stories and having our guests I only took sparse notes, so the below is going to be a very brief overview of what we all discussed and heard during those meetings.

Beautiful tulips on the walk to the bus down in Cadboro Bay! Love the colour!

Unsurprisingly, each graduate student has their own story: their own path to developing their interests in the field they're currently studying. And the advice or insights or stories each of them shared are as varied as the people telling them. It's amazing the territory discussions have covered with this diverse set of students, whether it's hearing about stories about the Elk Island National Park or the Cooking Lakes Moraine from Frances, where she is conducting her work on gene flow among a number of mesocarnivore (animal whose diet consists of mostly meat!) species, and learning about the genetic techniques used to figure out these landscape scale animal behaviours and relationships. Or then about Nancy's math background and her excellence at developing the networking skills that have enabled her to co-publish a number of publications very quickly. She described the process as "pulling together different people's strengths," and recommended working with "people that you like;" if someone's getting in your way or preventing you from reaching your goals, making the connections you want, or supporting your work, get them out of the way and find someone better! I also really loved hearing about her ideas about writing, during which she encouraged writing quickly and getting the writing out quickly, because someone else will fix the mistakes that you've made (give feedback). :)
Kira and Christy are both amazing women doing very interesting work! Christy on finding out about specific habitat ranges for a variety of bird species in the Willmore Wilderness. Christy's two cents: make sure to take the time to build relationships with your supervisors, and mentioned that when her supervisor says something's going to be easy, it definitely won't be! There are all sorts of curveballs that come along the way, and you work your way through them!

Kira identified a few different roadblocks, from struggling with a statistics course, to feeling the insidious isolation that we find at different parts of our grad school experience, but reminded us to be adaptive, as things always change. Further, "don't take yourself too seriously," and "Don't compare yourself to others." This last point is one that I can really identify with; some of my early grief in my program began with the constant comparing, and accompanying worry that I wasn't working hard enough, or doing enough, or learning quickly enough, or wasn't smart enough, etc. It is hard, though, when working with a bunch of fantastic, brilliant, and intelligent people!

Kira found a group of other PhD women working in ecology that became a sort of support group that's really been helpful for building  camaraderie and excitement and a deeper engagement with her graduate experience. This sounds very similar to what I've recently been enthusing about with my writing group! :) And one final bit of advice: meet with your supervisor regularly, even if you feel you don't have much to discuss. There is always more to discuss than you think! And it is good to check in with how things are going, and keep the forward momentum going.

And our dogwoods are blooming on campus now, too! :) Love these ones! 

Jonaki had some incredible stories, including about some of the adventures she had during her PhD, such as losing her hardrive and the backup of her hard-drive due advised us to be our own "project managers: set an agenda, go through the material;" your supervisors will appreciate the professionalism, and similar to Kira's advice, it will keep the momentum going.

Garrett had some really practical advice, too, and encouraged us to become much more assertive communicators, by asking for very specific things from our supervisors when it comes to feedback (he's also in the writing phase right now), and provided some useful ways to frame these requests: "This would be most helpful" or "I'd like this kind of feedback," which can guide the expectations for what he'd most like to hear from his supervisor.

Everyone has their ups and downs, and finds different ways to tackle the surprises and challenges that come along the way.

I'm sorry because in a way I can recognize that this post falls very short of expressing the delight of sitting in on the presentations, and hearing the varied experiences, the voices and stories of different researchers, and the adventures that they shared, but I hope this at least gives a little sense of these wonderful people.

The next post is going to be Garrett's recommendations on teaching, because that was one aspect I'd been particularly keen on hearing from him, but we didn't get a chance to talk about it too much because we ran out of time at the lab meeting!

If I do this again in the future, I will try much harder to write soon after each of the lab meetings with the respective guests.

Post 45: Just Over the Half-Way Hump Trying to Keep Up the Energy!

Okay. Deep breaths. Square breathing, four seconds at a time.

This semester is proving more challenging than some previous semesters, and enormous amount of work at this point in the semester has no small role to play in that. I definitely like to be busy and feel productive, but there comes a point when everything feels a bit too much like madness and the burden of all my commitments feels overwhelming. Gotta keep something of an eye on balance, because when everything smashes together, it stops being fun, and it stops being what I want to do, and I don't like to coerce myself to relieve the pressure of deadlines and seeing through obligations.

Just last week I was buried in marking for the class I'm TAing, and it felt like last minute scrambling to get it all done. I was also hurriedly trying to edit my third thesis chapter to submit for Friday (got it in at 1:30AM, phew!), and dealing with guilt at not having more done on my other research project regarding climate change adaptation.

Walking towards Cadboro Bay, Mt. Baker off in the hazy evening rouge. 

So at this point in the semester the big challenge is fending off tiredness, making sure I get enough sleep, am still eating well, and still finding the energy to TA well, keep on top of my commitments, and meet all my deadlines. I had really bad stress anxiety last week, which felt horrible, and I'm so glad things are more under control now.

When life hands us the busy-time lemons, it seems like one of the best things to do is admit that things are hard, and try to tackle things on the to-do list so the stress can level off, and the super-stress is no longer useful. It was also really helpful for me to remind myself that as stiff as I think the deadlines are, I can still make time to go for a walk, and to get 8 hours of sleep, and to read in bed for 10 minutes before turning out the light. All of the little (and healthy) behavioural patterns that I usually still do are more than valuable and necessary for supporting me in accomplishing my work goals.

But when those tough moments hit, I am so grateful for the many kindnesses of my partner and friends for helping to keep my spirits up. The daylight savings time-change has also been incredible. I love that it's still light when I leave work now, and I still feel like doing things much later into the evening. It also helps that my iron levels are back up—I can feel the difference now, and I went to the gym on Sunday again for the first time in almost 4 months! YAY!

So here's to celebrating the small successes along the way, and acknowledging just how much I am getting done. It's harder to do than I sometimes think, with the next task ahead of me right away.

All in all, though, it's been a lovely week, especially so when I remember back to last week. I went to a reading and spent an evening with a close friend on Tuesday, and today we had a great lab meeting, Skyping in a grad student in our program, Kira Hoffman, who's at Oregon State University, for the semester, alongside another PhD guest, Christy James, who shares our building here at the university. Thank you, thank you to them both! I love hearing their different perspectives (more on this in the next post), and just appreciate having these conversations a lot.

Another gorgeous West Coast evening. Love these skies!

Afterwards, we had a mini-celebration with Rob Watt, long-time Mountain Legacy supporter and expert—he's likely the most knowledgeable person in Canada about the historical topographical maps that MLP uses for its research. Between a few really tasty snacks, and excellent storytelling by my supervisor, Rob, and MLP expert, Mary, it was an afternoon that zipped right by, and had my sides hurting from all the laughter. Great way to bring to a close a very good week.

Research-wise, I'm getting back into NVivo, and strategizing how to write my fourth chapter, which will cover my findings from the interviews. More on that soon, too.