My experience at this year\u2019s ESA Annual meeting was unforgettable. Returning as a graduate school student and SEEDS Alumni Mentor, I not only had the chance to connect with old and new participants of the SEEDS program, but I also had the opportunity to grow professionally and gain insight on atypical ecological careers paths \u00e2\u20ac\u201c several of which I am actually considering. Of all these great experiences, though, the most meaningful aspect of the meeting came when I realized how important the human dimension (mentorship, education, and community relations) is to the ecological sciences. Now looking back on my participation with the SEEDS program, experiencing this from a science society is what attracted me to the discipline in the first place.<\/p>\n
Before leaving San Jose, I decided to continue with this important aspect of ecology. I joined an outreach planning committee initiated by SEEDS students, composed of both general ESA members and students. Already, we are making progress by planning a K-12 student\/teacher outreach fieldtrip and possibly another field trip to a local grassroots project for ecologists to share their expertise with local environmental groups. I can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t wait to see the results of our planning. I especially look forward to seeing what kind of impact we may leave on both Milwaukee residents and participating ecologists.<\/p>\n
Contributed by Lauren McGee, Ohio State University<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My experience at this year’s ESA Annual meeting was unforgettable. Returning as a graduate school student and SEEDS Alumni Mentor, I not only had the chance to connect with old and new participants of the SEEDS program<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[89],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-68","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ecology-education"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}