- All right, I'm Travis Belote,
with the Wilderness Society in Bozeman, Montana.
The town that was brought up
as being really white earlier today.
(audience laughs)
And I can attest to that.
I'm here to talk to you about my involvement
with the EcologyPlus program,
and how we used remote internships in some of our,
and what we've learned from that process.
A little bit about EcologyPlus,
it's actually an NSF INCLUDES program,
supported program,
led by Teresa Mourad at Ecological Society of America,
and George Middendorf at Howard,
who are both Co-PI's on this project.
And it's really meant to bring together
a collective of organizations
and a cohort of students to work on these things:
mentor and networkings,
entering career pathways,
access to opportunities
and overcoming and identifying institutional barriers.
And so when I first approached Teresa
about how we could potentially work together,
we came up with this idea of a remote internship.
And so remote internship is a way
of making opportunities more accessible to different people.
And so I'm in Bozeman,
which is in the West there,
and the students, this co-hort of students,
were recruited from the Baltimore and D.C. area.
And so how can we give an opportunity
to do ecological research
in this remote internship setting?
We focused on...
I mean the reason I think I'm here
is that we focused on data science
and so the fact that you can use spatial data and GIS
and it's available, widely available,
for lots of different qualities and metrics,
be it biophysical or cultural or other.
To focus on that being the way
that we do the remote internships focus
on doing data science.
So we learned things like just basic scientific process,
asking questions,
formulating hypothesis,
collecting the data, analyzing it,
doing summaries, data display,
making maps, and then telling a story.
And so through this we felt like these
were transferable skills of working with data,
working with GIS,
no matter whether the students go into ecology
or some other field,
these were transferable skills
that would be useful to them in their careers.
One of the things,
so the three things we learned,
so this is the clickbait,
the three things we learned.
Although I just learned another one at lunch
that I wanna make sure I get to.
Is that even though remote is,
that was the point of the project,
is to do remote internships
where what the idea of making
these opportunities accessible to more people,
it's invaluable to have time together.
And so the three students,
Edem, who will be speaking next,
came out to Montana and we spent a 14, or 15-hour day
in Yellowstone, doing the whole Figure Eight Loop Road.
Getting to know each other and doing training,
understanding each other.
Just getting to know each other was the biggest part,
but we also did a lot of just training
and coming up with formulated questions,
downloading data sets,
getting our feet wet with things.
This was a really long week for everybody, (chuckles)
but it was awesome!
The other thing,
so spend time together,
and then make sure you have good software
and good ways of doing screen shares.
And I'm...
For those of you that are savvy,
this is probably an easy thing,
but if you work for an organization,
you need to make sure that they're committed
to providing resources to doing,
and I know that a lot of these things are free,
Google Hangouts and those sorts of things.
But if you need to buy the $500.00 TeamViewer
or subscription things like that,
invest in this ability to screen share.
Whether it's the student's sharing the screen with you,
or you sharing the screen with them
and letting them watch you code,
or watch you click around in GIS,
that is invaluable to be able to not only
have face-to-face time through remote internship,
but also just doing shadowing and sharing screens
and taking turns on that.
That's been super helpful.
And so figuring that out early is really important.
And then make sure there's stakes in the game,
so both from the mentor perspective
and the student perspective.
Having a deliverable that you're both accountable for
is really important.
You can't just say,
"Oh, we're gonna do a remote internship."
"We'll meet once-a-month,
"or once every two weeks and learn some stuff."
Early on we said,
"Okay, I'm flying back to D.C.,
"and you all are going to give presentations
"to my staff and the organization,
"and we're going to open it up as a webinar
"to everybody in the organization and with EcologyPlus."
"And you're gonna present what you've worked on."
and I think that was a really important thing that we did
is to have accountability
and something to show for the work that we've done.
'Cause otherwise I'm busy,
they're busy taking classes,
and it would be too easy to easily go
to the last thing on your list to do in the week.
So having accountability's really important.
The thing that we talked about at lunch that we didn't do,
(chuckles) which I would add to this is
have a debrief.
We never debriefed.
We never got together and said,
"What worked well?"
"What didn't work well?"
"How could I have been better?"
"What could we have done to make the process better?"
We didn't do that.
We identified it just about an hour ago at lunch.
(audience laughs)
I wish we'd have done it,
so there's my fourth thing.
And thank you for your time.
Thanks for having me.
This is a huge honor to be here.
(audience claps)