Week Thirteen: November 17 - 23

Monday started with a break from sewing, for once! Brian had a guest visiting for a conference in DC, another amphibian researcher named Anthony who mostly works out of Sydney, Australia. Apparently he was involved with creating frog saunas to help fight chytrid fungus! Anyway, Brian wanted to take him out to see some of the salamanders we have on campus, so we spent most of the morning turning over rocks near Posey Creek. We found some red-backs, duskies, two-lined, and even a massive slimy salamander under a log! Then it was back to the sweatshop for the rest of the day - we got all the seams for the remaining 10 mesocosms finished, so they'll just need zippers!

Tuesday was our Build-a-Zoo presentations, where we discussed the different needs that the exhibit design (and budget) for our theoretical African Painted Dogs would need to fulfill. Vet staff, outreach, research, nutrition, enrichment, and of course entertainment were all the big ones. I think in the end, our budget wound up being almost 5 million dollars for everything we'd need just to get started (including salaries for employees, the construction of the enclosure, the construction of a visitor center, and more). 2 million of that was just for the fencing! It felt a bit absurd seeing all the numbers add up so quickly. But it was also good practice for next week, when our case study groups will be presenting a pitch for funding to Jim and Stephanie - including a budget.

And speaking of budgeting, in the afternoon we had a guest come in to talk about grant-making. It was pretty interesting, since he works more on the grant-giving and grant-managing side of things than the grant-applying, so it was a different perspective than I feel like I get most of the time. And he only got into doing conservation work relatively recently, which is especially neat because he's around my mom's age! We've had such a variety of guests with a huge breadth of backgrounds, not all originally in conservation, but I feel like most of them figured themselves out by their mid-to-late 20s, so it was especially pleasant to see someone who had a fulfilling life before getting into conservation and then chose to make that change anyway. It makes me feel a bit better about my future.

On Wednesday we had our final journal club! We were talking about the focus on changing attitudes versus changing behaviors in conservation. Attitudes are great, but they're not really a strong predictor of specific conservation-related behaviors; ie, being in favor of bird conservation doesn't mean they'll keep their cats inside. So, the fact that a lot of conservation-related things focus on attitudes as a metric is a bit concerning, because it doesn't accurately reflect potential actions. It was a super neat paper, and I think I'll actually be able to use it for my case study paper (when I finally get around to revising it...)

After that, we talked more about grants, from the application side of things. The whole process seems very intimidating, but I guess it's good that I've learned more about how to do it effectively. We went through a lot of examples of marketing strategies as part of it, since a lot of effective grant-making seems to be selling yourself and your project, which thankfully, I have some experience doing. I never thought that terrible sales job I worked would come in handy, but being able to pitch something to people is always a useful skillset, I suppose!

Stephanie also did a small seminar on grad school. I'm definitely not ready to apply this year, but I think I'll be in a good position to start looking at things by the summer of 2025. I want to apply to a couple schools in the US, a couple in Europe, and a couple in Australia, just to get a variety of options. Which means I need to look at which schools I want to apply to, which means I need to find researchers who are active in my field, which is... a problem for me once this semester is over.

Thursday and Friday were both work days, which was a nice break.