2 March 2020

Ocean Sciences 2020: SciComm, professional devo, non-academic advice, & more!

Posted by Shane Hanlon

By Shane M Hanlon

Last week was the Ocean Sciences (Oceans) meeting in San Diego, a joint a meeting between AGU, ASLO, and TOS. I personally love Oceans as it’s an opportunity to do my job while also having time to actually go to sessions (this isn’t possible at Fall Meeting b/c, well, this). But more than just having time to breathe, the Oceans attendees are some of the most engaged scientists who I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with. And while I was happy to have that breathing room, I was still busy:

Student Conference presentation: Online Footprint & Science Communication: On the Sunday before the conference starts, we always hold some sort of scicomm workshop (see next). This year I had the pleasure to be invited to do something additional, and a little different, from my normal job. As part of the Student and Early Career Scientist Conference, I gave a presentation on defining your online footprint. This is beyond just social media: Why should scientists be on LinkedIn (networking)? Is it worth having a personal website (yes)? Is social media too much of a dumpster fire to be worth it (no)? I love talking about this stuff and am always happy to chat more w/ folks.

Workshop: Sharing Science with any audience: An interactive workshop on the essentials of good SciComm: We offer scicomm workshops in a variety of forms. In this 1/2-day workshop, we covered the basics of why we do scicomm, the importance of identifying and connecting with your audience, the role of storytelling in scicomm, and more! Interested in hosting your own workshop? You can request us to come to you!

Presentation: Telling Stories about Science and Ourselves: As part of the Career Center at Oceans, I got to put on two interactive presentations for a captivate audience (it helped that the Career Center was located in the middle of the poster hall). The first was on the value of storytelling in scicomm.

Presentation: Hashtag Science: Science Communication through Social Media: The second presentation was on the basics of social media and how to effectively utilize it as a scicomm device. We have a growing number of resources on the subject from toolkits to web guides to webinars!

Panels on non-academic careers: This is something that I’ve always been passionate talking about. It’s not officially been part of my job but I think that’s changing. In the meantime, we have lots of great career materials via AGU.

If you missed us at Oceans but still want to engage with us, check out all the resources above and consider joining the Sharing Science Community! We look forward to connecting with you in the future.

Shane M Hanlon is Program Manager of AGU’s Sharing Science Program. Find him @EcologyOfShane.