NEWS

Just after the start of the new year, NM EPSCoR welcomed 20 post-docs to the Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge for an intensive three-day program designed to enhance the professional skills of post-doctoral scholars in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. NM EPSCoR brought experts from around the country to lead workshop sessions on meeting facilitation, communicating science, writing proposals, career planning, entrepreneurship, mentoring, and more. NM EPSCoR researcher Johanna Blake participated in this year's workshop; she kindly wrote about her experience.

From January 5th-8th, 2015, I had the opportunity to attend the first NM EPSCoR postdoctoral workshop held at the Sevilleta Field Station in New Mexico. A group of over 20 postdoctoral fellows from New Mexico, Idaho, and Nevada gathered for this 4 day workshop to learn about facilitating meetings, communicating science to the public, teaching approaches, entrepreneurship, ethics in science, submitting grant proposals to NSF, and work-life balance. Additionally, we stayed in casitas at the field station and were able to network with our fellow postdocs during the workshop. The workshop was incredibly informative; not only through the sessions presented, but also sharing experiences with each other.

I personally found several workshop sessions to be extremely useful. These included a session on facilitating productive meetings where we learned and participated in activities that narrowed down ideas relating to the most important mentoring for postdocs and ideas for new research. Additionally, each postdoc had the opportunity to practice their communication to the media through mock interviews for television, radio and print. I practiced a mock television news interview with David Marash, an accomplished journalist. Another particularly useful session, on teaching, was facilitated by Dr. Gary Smith from UNM, where we learned how to better run a class session through activities rather than the classic lecture style. The NM EPSCoR staff clearly spent countless hours organizing this event, which was very successful. I think I speak for my postdoctoral colleagues when I say this was time well spent in the beautiful desert of New Mexico.