It’s time to go back to topics that I consider useful for others. It may well be an illusion, but you never know where the average BSc/MSc/young PhD student of ecology surf on the web. She may have shipwrecked in this blog.
Let’s talk about courses that are useful for young ecologists. I must immediately confess that I think that every course on whatever ecological subject could be useful, given that the teacher is good and the program is well structured. If you have read my previous post (#2) on the R software, you also know that I believe a student would get enormous benefits from learning R (together with statistics, to avoid ending up with functioning but meaningless codes). I am also a great supporter of scientific writing and communication courses, as you will likely end up writing articles, preparing posters, talking at conferences, and all these things are easier with some guidelines.
On the other hand, there is virtually an endless list of courses offered at various universities and, nowadays, also on the web, and honestly, they are not all that essential. Even PhD courses supposedly meant for high education are not always satisfactory. I am sure you have your memories of not-so-useful courses, too. Unfortunately, there may be limitations with the period of the course, the course location, the registration fee, the number of credits, etc. so that in the end you are not that free in your choice. This post is for students who may have this freedom and are looking for a nice course in conservation biology. If you are already done with your course requirements, you can still read the post and share it with your colleagues.
This course is the Greek Summer School in conservation biology, and it’s organised by the University of Ioannina with the support of the European Section of the Society for Conservation Biology (SCB-Europe), although it boasts professors (and researchers) from several European universities. The course is held at the field station in Ano Pedina, which is an amazing location that will leave you amazed for the entire 2 weeks of the course if you love biodiversity. I am in the position to recommend this course because, until now, I am the only person who has experienced it as a student (in 2014) and as a teacher (in 2019, when I was invited to give a 2-day refresh course on R and to give a lecture on biodiversity).
I am not going to give you an overview of each class, don’t worry. I won’t even talk about the two days of excursions (but I will include some photos I took during the walks). For whoever is curious, I am providing the link to the summer school at the end of the post. Instead, I will tell you what I enjoyed the most of the course, besides the friendly atmosphere that spontaneously emerges when you share your time with other people who love nature. University courses are often structured in a very specific way to cover a very specific subject. This is praxis because to master a topic you need to be fully immersed in it, and rarely a single course is enough. This sort of “reductionist” teaching approach, however, does not reflect what you are going to be your responsibilities as a researcher. Yes, you need an understanding of your research topic to generate ideas and hypotheses, but you also need to know how to design an experiment, how to collect and analyse data, and how to present the results. I can’t think of many courses where all these aspects are simultaneously covered.
The Greek Summer School is planned in a way that students are going to face frontal class on ecological theory, sampling methodologies, and statistical techniques, before going to the field for doing practical activities and collecting data, and finally, present the results of their projects at the end of the course. This is exactly what researchers do, just on a small scale. The course is quite intensive and it is demanding for both students and professors, but it’s a lot of fun and it’s useful. If something, the summer school may need to be extended at least another week...
What can I say, I can't get enough of butterflies, and I hope to see you there!
댓글