Spring Courses

Spring semester at LSU is finally over! It's absolutely flown by, especially the last six weeks or so, and at times I've felt like I've accomplished very little throughout it. But looking back and reflecting, I know I've learnt a lot, feel I'm slowly becoming a better ecologist and scientist, and have had a bit of fun in the process.

My course load this semester was intense, and to make things even worse I was still teaching two introductory biology laboratories and trying to get my research underway. Near the beginning of this semester I decided to swap from a PhD to Master's which puts a lot of pressure on to get good experiments done in less than two years but will result in extremely valuable experience for when I go for my PhD eventually. Two of my classes were full classes and the other two were seminar classes, which meet just once a week. These seminar classes both involved reading an entire book over the course of the semester, discussing a chapter or two each week. The books we read were Fifty Years of Invasion Ecology: The Legacy of Charles Elton, an edited book with all chapters written by different authors, and Plant Defense by Dale Walters, both pretty dry reading unless you're really interested in these subjects. The invasion ecology book was definitely a lot more interesting and useful for me than the other.

However, the course I enjoyed the most this semester was "Community Ecology", which was taught by Dr. Kyle Harms. The sub-discipline of community ecology is basically the study of species interactions and the forces that structure ecological communities (species richness and biodiversity) and is particularly relevant to my own interests and field of study. For the class we would read and discuss a couple of influential papers or book chapters in the two classes each week as well as taking in one lecture per week. At the end of the semester each student had to give a 30 minute presentation on the contribution of a particular community ecologist. This "symposium" was the coolest part of the whole class and I got to learn about the diverse work of some great ecologists. My own talk was on Nick Gotelli, a great ecologist from the University of Vermont; you can see a short video where he outlines some of his more famous and very cool work below at the bottom of this post.

Grades are in as of today and I got straight A's to go with my A and B from last semester. Stoked!