A great opportunity to network with colleagues

In October, I attended the Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC Research Advisory Forum in Canberra.  As a second year PhD candidate still in the early stages of my research, I found this forum to be an incredibly productive experience. 

On the first day we attended a professional development workshop focusing on life after the PhD.  We heard from a wide range of speakers, ranging from academics to land managers to university officials to the CEO of the CRC Association about the PhD and life afterwards.  It was really valuable to hear such a wide range of perspectives on how people got to where they are and gave me some ideas on how I need to position myself for the workforce after my PhD.

The real meat of the forum occurred on the second and third days, when the academics and end users got together to discuss the current state of the CRC research projects.  This was done through a number of presentations and then smaller, research group-level meetings.  These meetings, especially, were valuable to me because I got to see how my research on fire danger in Tasmania’s wet forests fits into existing CRC projects, and how much collaboration there is between the academics and end users in the CRC.

Most importantly, this forum offered me the opportunity to network with both my peers and numerous academics in my field.  I was lucky enough to be able to communicate the data I’ve collected on Tasmania’s wet forest fuel loads and how I plan to analyse it in the form of a three-minute thesis. That I had a number of end-users and researchers approach me afterwards enquiring about my research made me understand that, even as a PhD student, my research was an integral part of the CRC’s mission.   

It was such an incredible opportunity to be able to chat with so many researchers whom I have cited extensively in my writing, and to hear the feedback they had on my research.  Being smaller than a traditional research conference, the forum provided me an opportunity to interact a lot more with the fire management community, and was a truly valuable experience for an early career researcher such as me.