Increasing communication and participation in ESPO

From the January 2009 GSA newsletter (Amber Watts, Secretary):

As the new secretary of the ESPO section of GSA, I welcome my first newsletter as an opportunity to introduce myself, highlight the successes of ESPO over the past year, and introduce some goals for our upcoming year.

As a student who defended her dissertation in December 2008, I was very aware this year of the role of GSA’s annual meeting in the lives of its emerging scholars. I was a keen observer of the value of ESPO for professional networking, job hunting, establishing a unique role in the field, and developing interdisciplinary collaboration.

During the past year, ESPO has made progress on several programs including the Campus Ambassador program and ad-hoc planning committee. A major goal this year was to increase communication and participation among ESPO members outside of the annual meeting. An ESPO Facebook page and academic blog were some creative solutions to reach this goal. Please check them out online (see the web addresses below). We had continuing success at the annual meeting with our traditional events including the paper award, wine and cheese, and fellows meet the students.

To increase participation at the annual meeting, several new ideas were debuted including an ESPO lounge for members to network in an informal setting, the ESPO dine around to give members a chance to network with colleagues over dinner, the creation of materials to get the word out about activities of interest to emerging scholars, and encouragement of participation in the IAGG meeting in Paris (July 2009).

For the coming year, new ideas continue to be explored to improve the resources available to ESPO members. One new idea is the development of a reviewer-in-training program to mentor junior scholars in the process of journal reviews. We also hope to introduce online resources for emerging scholars such as example grant applications and tips about choosing journals for manuscript submission.

We love to hear innovative ideas from ESPO members throughout the year. Please feel free to let us know how ESPO and GSA can better serve the needs of its emerging scholars. Contact me at amberwat@usc.edu.

Amber Watts
ESPO Secretary

For more information see the following resources:
ESPO Homepage
http://www.geron.org/Students/

ESPO Blog
http://gsa-espo.blogspot.com/

Facebook
http://www.facebook.com
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