This is one of a series of blog posts on the Journeys of Dr. G blog for the 2015 AGU Fall Meeting. Feel free to read my posts for pre-meeting, Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.

This I knew was going to be one of my busiest days – at least it ended up being scheduled this way (in reality, every day is a “busy day” where you are at a conference!). My morning started with a breakfast planning meeting with my AGU Meeting Undergraduate Mentee, Kimberly (I’ll have more about her in a future post). Kimberly and I are required to connect with each other every day, as part of the Mentoring Program. So we compared our schedules and agreed on meeting times and places (turns out we’ve already seen each other more times than we scheduled, which has been great!).

Then I hung up my poster in the Poster Hall before the required 8AM poster hanging time, and I quickly dashed off to the Marriott Hotel to be a speaker in the Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR) workshop titled Getting Started in Undergraduate Research. The workshop is for faculty, post-docs, and graduate students that are in the early stages of working with students in inquiry-based projects. I presented on working with freshmen- and sophomore-level students on research in classes, research that is community-based, and building overall research skills.

After I presented my material, I had to leave the workshop and quickly dash back over to the convention center to stand at and “present” my poster! I was a collaborator with several others on Integrating Discovery-Based Research Experiences into the Undergraduate STEM Curriculum: A Convocation Report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (see abstract). At the poster, I was handing out copies of the Convocation report, as well as the cards you see in the image that listed the website for the report. It was exhausting standing and talking to people for three hours, but there were great interactions with everyone!

That’s me, holding a copy of the report I handed out at my poster in the AGU Poster Hall Monday morning!

After the poster, I headed on over to a Special Session. The XPRIZE team was here at AGU, and they were going to announce their next XPRIZE Competition not in New York City, but at the AGU Fall Meeting! Turns out the competition is on a topic very near and dear to my heart – surveying the ocean floor (some of you students may remember that I went out to sea with NOAA for three weeks last year on a hydrographic survey –  now, as a result of this competition, we may have some new technologies to help out the NOAA Ship Thomas Jefferson and the rest of their fleet!). I wrote an entire summary about this event on my AGU GeoEd Trek blog.

After the exciting XPRIZE announcement and press conference, I headed over to my next event, a meet-up with my second mentee of the AGU meeting – this time, a graduate student interested in science communication (more about Esther in a later post, too!). The Sharing Science Mentoring Meet-Up was so much fun, and I look forward to seeing Esther do some science communication with her pink ukulele (yes, you read that right) at the AGU Open Mic night on Tuesday.

After seeing some more posters in the Poster Hall and taking mine down at 6PM, I headed over to my last event of the night, the Earth Science Women’s Network (ESWN) reception. This amazing organization does so much to help women in all aspects of their careers, from sharing teaching and job search strategies to working through challenging situations in the work place and in the field. I’ve gained so much from this group of inspiring women, and it was great to meet some new members I did not know previously at the reception.

Phew! I then dragged myself back to the hotel to do some blogging, answer emails, and fall asleep. I’m not yet fully on West Coast time, so I’m pretty tired pretty early in the evenings here. But no time for exhaustion! I still have four more full days of conference activities and networking and mentoring (and somehow, I have to fit in the papers I still have yet to grade…).

More to come!