Posted By
ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies
James Cook University Townsville
Queensland 4811 Australia
Phone: 61 7 4781 4000
Email: info@coralcoe.org.au
It’s not normal for PhD students to step away from their laptops and take their minds off study, but that was the requirement of the 2018 Coral CoE Student Retreat, hosted in Brisbane this past July as part of the Centre’s annual symposium events.
Organised by the Student Committee, the Student Retreat is the one day a year that Coral CoE students from around the country can get together, network and learn about topics ranging from mental health to creative communication.
This year the retreat was held at the University of Queensland, where more than a dozen staff and students of the Centre are based.
The day started with presentations by two Coral CoE alumni. Giving their spin on careers outside of academia, Dr Chris Doropoulos, currently an employee at CSIRO, and Dr Pete Waldie an employee at The Nature Conservancy, spoke about the skills that helped them get their jobs.
Both speakers reflected on the value of transferable skills developed during their PhD including project management, team work, and science communication, and the advantages these skills provided in their post-PhD work lives. They even discussed the silver-lining of failure: that unsuccessful grants can lead to more practice and better writing skills in the long run.
Next, participants engaged in a session exploring the often-overlooked emotional side of undertaking a PhD. Mental health professionals, Stephanie MacMahon and Annita Nugent, discussed how to cope with the ups and downs of the PhD journey. Students were given the opportunity to talk about different ways to understand problems, get support and how to manage their mental health proactively. Also discussed were strategies to fight procrastination and improve productivity using ‘shut up and write’ groups.
The retreat concluded with a final workshop ‘How to make a Comm-OCEAN,’ led by science communication super-star, Dr Sue Pillans. Students visualised their research with a sketch lesson and learned how to communicate to different audiences using storytelling. Sue demonstrated how using art and creative thinking can complement scientific research and help scientists have an impact in the real world.
All-in-all the 2018 Student Retreat was a great way to meet other students, try new things and gain wisdom from people who intimately understand the challenges and opportunities of pursuing a PhD…
New research has found as climate change causes the world’s oceans to warm, baby sharks are born smaller, exhausted, undernourished and into environments that are already difficult for them to survi
A new study shows the coastal protection coral reefs currently provide will start eroding by the end of the century, as the world continues to warm and the oceans acidify. A team of researchers led
A team of scientists led by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (Coral CoE) won one of the nation’s top science awards at tonight’s ‘Oscars of Australian science’, the Eureka P
An analytical tool will be used to assess the climate risks facing historic World Heritage sites in Africa—the ruins of two great 13th century ports and the remains of a palace and iron-making indus
Abstract: It is a little over a decade since research commenced into the effects of anthropogenic ocean acidification on marine fishes. In that time, we have learned that projected end-of-century
Abstract: Increased uptake of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere has caused the world’s ocean to become more acidic. Different marine habitats are known to have varying ranges of CO2 across mul
Abstract: The Allen Coral Atlas (http://allencoralatlas.org) partnership uses high-resolution satellite imagery, machine learning, and field data to map and monitor the world’s coral reefs at unp
Abstract: Climate change is causing the average surface temperature of the oceans to rise and increasing the frequency and intensity of marine heatwaves. In addition, absorption of additional CO2
Abstract: Marine environments are a concealing medium, where observations of natural fish behavior are challenging. In particular, the geographic and depth distributions of migratory top predators ar
Abstract: Invasive species management can be the the subject of debate in many countries due to conflicting ecological, ethical, economic, and social reasons, especially when dealing with a species s
Abstract: Ocean acidification, the increase in seawater CO2 with all its associated consequences, is relatively well understood in open oceans. In shelf seas such as the Great Barrier Reef, processe
Abstract: The backdrop of legends and movies, the deep sea has always been unfathomable because we had no idea what existed there. Once thought to be barren of life, we now know this couldn’t be
ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies
James Cook University Townsville
Queensland 4811 Australia
Phone: 61 7 4781 4000
Email: info@coralcoe.org.au