Thursday, January 9, 2014

A New Year, a new update

2013 has come to a close, and my first semester of graduate school has as well. I emerged victorious, and the break before second semester has been good to me.

I unfortunately didn't blog about my time at the 2013 Entomological Society of America conference in Austin in November, but I did write a few posts for EntomologyToday. The first was about how Twitter is useful for entomologists, and the second was about using Storify to organize tweets. Suffice it to say that the conference left me exhausted and still wanting more. I had a spectacular time meeting other entomologists, grad students, and friends (old and new), and I heard some scintillating talks.

I'm now looking ahead to the future. My next semester has been thrown out of whack already, due to my plant taxonomy class being cancelled (much to my disdain), so now I'm searching for a new class to take. I'm bitter about losing plant taxonomy.

I'm also hoping to TA my first class--any tips are welcome.

My main focus during the next semester will be working on my thesis question and research. Related to that goal, I want to publish at least one paper (or at least have it submitted), take a shot at making science/nature videos, and of course, spread the news about how great millipedes are.

Not to mention set aside more time for blogging. I've noticed that I tend to tweet more thoughts and experiences that I used to make into blog posts, so I'm going to be more wary of that in the future.

I'm looking forward to a productive, fun, and scary but exciting 2014, and I wish the same to everyone else.

4 comments:

  1. Congrats. If you're going to be setting aside time for blogging, let me know if you're interested in writing a guest post about millipedes (or anything else animal-related for that matter). Your statement, "I help people realize that they really love insects." is very much in line with the goals of my blog, and invertebrates are woefully underrepresented there, aside from a post I wrote about eating grasshoppers.

    Cheers.

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    Replies
    1. Hey David, I'd definitely be interested in writing a guest blog. I'll be in touch.

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  2. Sounds like a good set of goals to start with. Expect them to change, mine always seem to.

    ~Kai

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  3. Derek,

    Glad to have discovered your blog yesterday. I sent you an e-mail, relating to Ozark odonates. Keep it up.

    ReplyDelete

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