17/02/14 - Dragons' Den

So I've been to the Dragons' Den...

http://www.yogabugs.com/blog/?tag=dragons-den

 ...well maybe not the real one...ours looked more like this...



...but it was the same principal.

In the beginning...
...We were randomly sorted into groups of 6, and told to produce a business idea. I didn't know any of the people in my group well, and was a bit nervous to begin with. I don't have a business head, and the idea of coming up with a new business idea, with strangers, and then getting assessed on it, was daunting.

Fortunately, we were given some starter ideas for businesses, and my team turned out to be very good. We quickly chose to develop Treborth Botanic Gardens as our business, and all came up with some fun and exciting ideas.

Promotional Video

After lunch, we had to produce a 20 second promotional video for our business. With only 40 minutes to prepare, this was a hard task, but we managed it admirably. We produced a video, using hand drawn pictures, that followed one family using Treborth throughout their life. The parents got married there, the kids went to summer school and went on class trips there. They then went to Botanical Beats and used the grounds during their time at Bangor University etc. Although the sound quality didn't turn out well, it was a fun experience to come up with, make, and produce a video in 40 minutes. This exercise really helped us bond as a team and get to know one another. Although the time pressure was stressful, I think we pulled through really well.

Pitch Presentation

The rest of the afternoon was spent preparing for the "Dragons' Den" part of the assessment. We had  to come up with a presentation that would outline our business and then pitch the idea to investors so that they would help us get the whole thing off to a good start. 

We split into 2 teams; 3 of us dealt with the introduction to Treborth and our plans to initiate and expand the business, and the other 3 dealt with the finances, projected income and outgoings, and investment needed to get the business off the ground.

We then presented these ideas to the rest of the class and the 4 "Dragons". I think the presentation went very well, but we should have focused on one business idea, rather than multiple ideas that could all raise money. The combination of the ideas would be too much to handle in practise, and so it would have been better to concentrate on one idea and develop this - maybe the summer camp idea.

All in all it was a very enjoyable day that allowed me to practise the art of good communication, time management and my presentational skills. I'm not sure I leant too much about actually setting up a business, but I can see how these skills would be applicable in any career.

Comments - 20/02/14

Joseph Couch: http://zoologylad.wordpress.com/2014/02/18/science-for-with-or-by-policy-markers-the-case-of-the-pontbren-project-seminar-by-dr-sophie-wynne-jones/

Comment:

" A really nice summary of the talk, but hard to follow with so little punctuation. Her talk was very interesting. Have you heard much about the current agroenvironmental schemes? Most of them state that a certain percentage of the land must be grown “environmentally” or the farmer won’t get certain subsidies. Most of the time these schemes don’t take the farmers opinion into account, and so they are forced to plant hedges, woods and crops in areas that simply aren’t suitable for them. Unsurprisingly this rarely works and only serves to make the farmers dislike the policy makers more intensely. I hope you can see, from this talk, how communication, and giving the power back to the farmer can actually grately improve the results and the attitudes of both sides towards each other. I hope Sophie can help get this kind of scheme implemented across the country."

Christian Dobre-Lereanu: http://whydowelovescience.wordpress.com/2014/02/08/daphnia-a-game-changer-in-environmental-genomics/

Comment:

" What do you feel you learnt from this talk? I also found it truly inspiring, but mainly due to the information John gave on Daphnia. I knew the genus existed before didn’t realise it was so incredibly morphologically plastic, and was found so widely. Professor Colbourne’s use of these creatures to create useful policy effecting data was also remarkable. To be able to use all the organism variants to test various aquatic chemical compositions was brilliant. It might really change the way future chemical spills, like that in Maywood, are treated. Was kind of crazy hearing the way they calculated “safe” levels of the chemicals! Hopefully John’s work will make all the water supplies slightly safer for us and ecosystems as a whole."

Clare Birch: http://cbirch66blog.wordpress.com/

Comment:

" Loved the video Clare…not sure the sound quality was up to much on any of the recorders. It was interesting to see all the different Treborth ideas that came up to! How’d the interview go? Just wondering how you think you learnt from this experience? I found the time pressure/management thing the most helpful, though team work was pretty fun as well. Had you met any of your team before? I didn’t know anyone in mine when we started but it’s amazing how well we worked considering.
If you had to run this workshop yourself, what would you do differently? I’d probably get rid of the video making bit and allow more time to research the business…ie. computer session. Might make answering The Dragons questions easier. Then again, the video bit was one of the more fun parts, so maybe just have more of that kind of thing? What do you reckon?"

14/02/14 - Science for, with or by policy makers?

Last Friday's lecture was all about policy making and the science behind it. Certain aspects of the talk linked well with the Daphnia lecture the week before (policy making being very loosely based on science), and most of the talk covered areas and schemes I'd never heard about before.

Dr. Sophie Wynne-Jones of Aberystwyth University presented the lecture, which was focused on the Pontbren Project. This is a project where 10 neighbouring farms, in Llanfair Caereinion, North Powys, covering ~1000 hectares, work together to manage the land in a sustainable manner that improves the natural environment, catchment hydrology and stock quality. An introduction and the history of the project can be found here: 
http://www.pontbrenfarmers.co.uk/project_background.html, but essentially the project started with 3 farms replanting hedgerows and shelter belts for their sheep; this then expanded to include 10 farms, all of which now manage the land to allow hardier sheep breeds to lamb outdoors, and to return to a less intensive, higher quality beef and lamb raising environment.

Dr. Wynne-Jones' talk focused on the balance that must be struck between farmers, doing all the actual ground work, and the policy makers (NRW, Welsh Government, LEADER, Scottish Power etc) deciding where funding goes. This balance is difficult to meet, and involves a lot of communication and data collection to support both sides equally. Sophie conducted research to produce a report that assessed how successful the project had been. Although her salary was paid for by the Welsh Government, she felt compelled to listen to the farmers and report their story as well as possible.

Overall the report seemed to show that the farmers methods of restoring, and being in charge of their own land worked far better than the prescriptive methods of agroenvironment schemes, such as Tir Gofal. By studying the land and historical maps, they were able to decide which areas were best for planting hedgerows, trees and creating ponds. By using their own knowledge of the farms, they produced a far more successful landscape in protecting their livestock and improving hydrology to reduce erosion. The project shows that by communicating more with farmers, agroenvironment schemes can be produced that fulfil both the needs of the policy makers and the farmers. 

I've worked closely with farmers for many years and have very rarely found any that talk kindly of the "government" - implying policy and funding bodies. This is because these bodies produce unreasonable targets, demand planting in areas it will never work, and very rarely explain why the work needs to be done. At Pontbren, the researchers have explained why stocking less intensively may help increase the health of the flock, why planting trees and hedgerows will reduce runoff and improve the retention rate of fertilisers, and explained the science behind all the other changes made on the farms. With this knowledge, the farmers have been far more keen to cooperate with the "outsiders", and have even taken that knowledge and implemented ideas that have seen improvements both economically and environmentally for the farms.

Hedge laying to create natural shelter for livestock and reduce runoff

This talk has opened my eyes to the general lack of communication between farmers and agroenvinoment policy makers, and showed me why there is such enmity between the two. Pontbren has proven that with better communication and explanation, the two sides can work together towards a common goal that improves yield, increases profits and restores the environment to a much healthier level. Hopefully the lessons learnt from Pontbren can be formalised and implemented across the country. If this happens we will have a lot happier farmers, a healthier ecosystem and economy, and far less money wasted on pointless agroenvironmental schemes that farmers don't conduct properly because no one explains the reasons behind them.

 

05/01/14 - Masterclasses - How to be a Consultant

I attended a two hour workshop on consultancy, run by world renowned international business consultant and start up mentor, Chris Walker. I intend to become an ecological consultant in the future, and so thought this masterclass would teach me some useful transferable skills. 

Chris began the session by introducing himself, and his impressive CV, and then introduced the idea of consultancy. Although he was mainly talking about business consultancy, I could see how the skills he described could be transferred to an ecological business. He introduced the two forms of consultancy - Expert and Process - and then told us how these were different. I will probably become an ornithological expert consultant in future, but it was good to know about process consultancy also.

We then had a quick exercise to try and suggest how you'd go about fulfilling a clients wishes, from the moment you make first contact, to when the contract was completed. This exercise was fun and informative, but Chris never actually confirmed whether our ideas were correct, in the right order or practically applicable. 

We were then introduced to a "client" (Chris' new eBuyGreen project manager) and told that she wanted us to consult on how to set up her new business. Although this seemed like a good practical way to test what being a consultant is, it turned into a focus group coming up with ideas for their new company. I appreciate how shrewd and clever this move was, getting free advice from students with a range of technical backgrounds and expertise to help their new company. However, I thought it was highly inappropriate to have lured us all there on the pretence of being taught about consultancy, to then use us to produce free ideas. Between the group of 30+ of us we gave them free advice on finance, law, marketing, product range and design, among other things. Both Chris and the project manager were writing all the ideas down and will plainly use them to develop their new company - not just a fake company for the purposes of this workshop.

I feel like some consultancy skills were learnt during this "masterclass", but it was plain that it had been set up as an opportunity for the eBuyGreen team to get free advice. There is another 2 hour session in 2 weeks and I hope this will have a more consultancy based angle than this session did. 

[Due to other university work, and the poor impression made by the first session, I did not attend the second one. Apparently it was more of the same and taught no more consultancy skills that the first workshop did]

31/01/14 - Model species Daphnia: a genome for the environment - Professor John Colbourne

John Colbourne presented this seminar on Daphnia and their practical use in environmental genomics. I'm not much of a molecular biologist, but am fascinated by the opportunities it offers to further scientific knowledge, and by how rapidly the discipline is expanding. Therefore I thought it would be advantageous to attend this lecture and find out what the current, world leading techniques in environmental genomics entail.

Introduction to the subject
After a most informative introduction by Gary Carvalho, Professor Colbourne (Birmingham University and Chair of Environmental Genomics) introduced the subject of environmental genomics. He pointed out that of 60,000 chemicals regularly released into our water supply by industrial, or human driven, processes, only 7% have been tested for their toxicity, and no tests have been done on mixtures of these chemicals. He stated that all these tests have been conducted in laboratory experiments and bare little or no resemblance to the natural environments these chemicals may be found in. Therefore, any policy decisions made about major chemical spills are never rigorously, scientifically backed. The policies are usually based on wild, highly unscientific extrapolations of data collected on these chemicals, and therefore has little or no justified significance to the situations that the policies effect.

Colbourne and his 10 year old Daphnia Genomics Consortium (https://wiki.cgb.indiana.edu/display/DGC/Home) are hoping to become a world leading authority on using Daphnia to assess water quality in the natural environment, and help governmental policy making by providing real scientific research on individual environmental situations.

Daphnia

These are fantastic little creatures. Like many other undergraduate zoological scientists, I knew very little about them before this talk. I know invertebrates can be wonderful study organisms, but my research rarely brings them into my consciousness. Daphnia turn out to be a very interesting! 

Daphnia galeata mendotae - (Gillespie, undated)

They have the largest number of genes know for any one species, can change their entire morphology in one moult cycle, and can be found across the world. They also reproduce using cyclical parthenogenesis which means they are very useful as a high throughput study organism. Their high genetic variation, and morphological change in response to environmental factors means that they can be very useful for studying the chemical composition of water samples. This video gives a brief introduction to Daphnia and its genome.

Colbourne and the consortium are using the Daphnia to test hundreds of millions of different chemical compositions and see what the morphological response to these are. Daphnia themselves are a keystone species in most aquatic environments, so by testing their response to the chemicals, it may be possible to assess the effect of those chemicals on the entire ecosystem. Click this link to watch a video of John explaining why Daphnia are good study organisms and what the Daphnia project hopes to do and achieve.



Summary
Although a lot of the genetic jargon in this talk was beyond my current molecular understanding, I found the entire concept fascinating. Any species that can be so varied and abundant as Daphnia is interesting in its own right, but the fact it can be used in a practical, scientific, policy helping manner makes it all the more fantastic. 

This talk has little relevance to my degree, or my intended career path, but I find it very interesting to know that these techniques exist, and I would be interested to find out the results the Consortium produce in the next decade.

References

Gillespie, J.H. (undated). Lake Sediments + Daphnia.

http://jhayleygillespie.wordpress.com/research/lake-sediments-daphnia/

CV and Covering Letter

Having joined this module in January, I was pleased to discover the first assignment was a covering letter and CV. As a breeding bird field ornithologist, all the positions offered for this year are advertised in late December / early January.

I saw this position advertised on Next Generation Birders Facebook page in late December, and immediately knew I had to apply for it :http://uglosbioscience.wordpress.com/skomer-island-ra/ . Originally there was no application deadline, and also no date of posting, so I applied for the job within 2 days of seeing the advert.

CV writing process
My voluntary history and academic qualifications were perfect for the job, but getting all of these into an easy to read format, and on to 2 A4 sides was a big challenge! Having attended a careers department CV workshop in November, I knew what needed to go into a CV, but this didn't make the process any easier. I wrote about 5 or 6 different CVs with different formats in the end. I sent the one I liked most to my sister, who works for Wiltshire Wildlife Trust, and has had many years experience of CV writing. She gave me some very useful feed back. 

Eventually I produced something I was very happy with, and also a good covering letter, and sent them off to Dr. Matt Wood at Gloucester University on 3rd January.

Waiting period

I didn't hear anything back until the 13th January (a nerve wrecking wait), when I received an email saying I'd made the short-list! This was great news. By this point he'd made the official CV deadline the 27th January and said that I wouldn't hear from him until after this date. However, I received another email on the 21st saying that he wanted a Skype interview on Wednesday 29th.

The interview and offer
This interview went very well indeed, and after Matt received my final reference, he rang me at 3pm on the 30th to offer me the position !! 

Although my voluntary history and references won me this job, I think it was my strong CV that got his attention. By writing several CVs in different ways (bullet point, wordy, skills based, chronological work history based) I was able to immalgimate all my favourite parts into one, very solid CV. I then used the covering letter to state why I was interested in the job, discuss my personal attributes, and put in some anecdotes that I wasn't able to fit into the CV but were relevant to the position. 

All in all, it was a successful CV and covering letter and I'm over the moon to have got the position. I start on 15th April and will be paid to watch birds for 4 months on Skomer!

Introduction

I am starting this blog in February, having joined the course this semester. I will therefore be writing double the number of blogs this semester, to catch up with the assessment criteria.