This week the Dean visited the department to outline BIO’s and UiB’s current position in the current national and international situation. There was a discussion from Gunn on the need for researchers to apply for external funding, with particular emphasis on writing proposals from EU funding such as the European Research Council (ERC). I myself have applied three times to the ERC and failed to get past the first round each time. After the talk the presentation got me thinking, do I want to go for the ERC again in the next few years?
Writing such proposals are very time consuming, and it can be disheartening to get the rejection email after the hard work put in. But being aware the rejection is the rule in academia (see here: https://www.nature.com/nature-index/news/six-ways-deal-with-rejection-research-academics), and thinking about the positive experiences gained from writing these failed applications, I am sure I will apply again.
In my experience, just writing the application and getting it a submitted has been a beneficial exercise. It was exciting to plan a large project for the next 5 years, to think about the big picture and be ambitious in my research goals, and to reach out to new collaborators. The failed ERC proposals have then been reused, adapted and improved, sent to the Research Council of Norway and other funding agencies. Some of these attempts have even then been successful. Now I just need to come up with a new idea to go again. If you think you have something then I would encourage you to do the same!
Writing grants takes time, and so it also means we need to be strategic about our teaching in the coming years. In past two months we started to think about this in the Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolution Faggruppe (BEØ). Many members of the BEØ staff are contributing to several departmental 100- and 300-level courses. This has meant our portfolio of 200 and 300 level courses has been relatively limited.
We held an away day to help redefine a teaching vision for BEØ which aims to keep our teaching relevant for both use researchers and the students. There have been lively discussions on which topics we should prioritise, which skills are most relevant for students today, and which courses should be set down. Other points we have addressed include the relative importance of physics and/or sustainability at the 100 level, and how to ensure master students leave our program with good balance of soft skills that will be relevant for their future careers.
Many of the topics considered important in BEØ were also identified by the Marine Faggruppe, who had coordinated a similar away day earlier this year. We have begun to coordinate between groups to allow cross departmental collaboration in teaching plans. We have also reinitiated discussions about collaborating with particular courses in other departments that might be able to cover skills that we have less capabilities to teach at BIO at present.
Last week’s program board meeting was the first opportunity to set some of these plans into place, and revised course descriptions were submitted related to courses in Reproducibility and Open Science, and for a course related to understanding how science underpinning the IPBES report is synthesized. It will be exciting to see these and other plans come into fruition over the coming years.
Alistair Seddon
Group leader, Ecology and evolution group [faggruppe]