When I accepted a position to work as a Graduate Research Assistant (GRA) while I completed my graduate studies, I did not know that it would open up the opportunity to travel to an international science communication conference. I was, then, very excited when this did become a reality, and was thankful for the opportunity it gave me to grow as a researcher and communicator.
As a GRA, I spent around 10 hours a week contributing to a research project initiated by one of my professors, focusing on a rhetorical analysis of Canadian public health communications during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. My time on the project was spent collecting the data we were going to analyze, performing background research, and doing qualitative coding of a subset of our data to see what patterns began to emerge.
Preparation for PCST
During our research process, our professor, Dr. Philippa Spoel, shared with us that she had applied to present the work at the Public Communication of Science and Technology (PCST) 2023 Conference in Rotterdam, Netherlands. Myself and my colleague were excited to commit to attending the conference to deliver the presentation, and as a research team we began developing the content for that presentation, which we were set to deliver during one of the parallel sessions at the conference.
With only a 10 minute time slot for presenting our work, we chose to focus in on one piece of our findings related to how the word 'risk' was being used by public health officers in discussing the pandemic. With our focus decided, we started to pull specific example excerpts to illustrate our findings, while we also prepared our own graphics to further help illustrate our main points. We also had to consider the background knowledge of those attending the conference, and what would be most important to share to provide context to our work. This was especially important to consider with it being Canadian-focused research, that we were presenting at an international conference. Finally, we also had to look at the excerpts we had taken, as well as our coding as a whole, and decide what final message and overall conclusion we wanted to draw and present from our work.
Once the structure of the presentation came together, myself and my colleague worked to develop the presentation slides and speaking notes. We focused on following some of the presentation best-practices we had learned through the Master's program, as well as an early conference workshop session, which included finding a way to 'hook' the audience right from the start. We also were fortunate to have the opportunity to practice our presentation for our classmates before leaving for Rotterdam, and received some valuable feedback that allowed us to reach the final iteration of our presentation.
Focus on Learning
I arrived at the conference in time to attend some of the pre-conference day workshops, wanting to get as much out of the experience as possible. Beforehand, I had looked through the program for the full week, and highlighted sessions that I thought would be valuable and interesting to attend based on my interests. This included sessions on using plain language and writing, video production, varied research topics in science communication, and more.
This was my first time attending a conference, and I was excited to participate in as many sessions as possible, wanting to learn from those who practice and research science communication. It was interesting hearing different perspectives from people with so many different backgrounds, but it was also really cool to identify common threads between conference sessions and what I had learned through the courses in my Master's program. Having been enthusiastic about the research I had been working on, it also made it that much more enjoyable to hear from others about what their research had demonstrated, and to hear recommendations about future actions to take as a result.
After delivering our presentation on the final morning of the conference (with a big sigh of relief!), it was also great to sit back and listen to the other research project presentations in our session, all of which were on similar, but uniquely distinct topics. These projects were particularly interesting to hear about since I was able to understand more clearly what they had done, through having worked on a similar project myself.
While we had to work on a tight timeline to prepare our presentation for the trip, I'm so grateful to have had the opportunity to attend the PCST conference, sharing what we found from our analysis, but also taking in as much as I could from other attendees. The PCST 2023 Conference was a great experience, and I'm hoping I will be able to attend the 2025 Conference to continue learning, this time with a new perspective as I move from being a graduate student researcher to being a science communication practitioner.
*When the research paper sharing the results of our work is published, I would be happy to share the link if you are interested in learning more!
Comments