PICS Conference in Vancouver, BC

Attendee: Daniel Larson

I attended the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions (PICS) Conference in Vancouver, BC this past week and therefore was unable to attend the Friday colloquium.  The first day we had a journalist come in and speak on tips to create a more streamlined presentation for dealing with stakeholders and the media.  This session was very interactive, which I enjoyed.  The speaker gave a power point presentation and had exercises for us during it.  The first exercise involved grouping a list of headlines from top news story to least important news story based on the newspaper company.  For example, ‘UN warns about devastating climate change effects’ would be placed number one for a liberal newspaper company, but not for a business newspaper company.  I found this exercise interesting, but struggled to realize how it was relevant to our studies.

The next exercise involved creating a short opening journal paragraph for one of our research projects.  My research was chosen in our group.  This exercise was very applicable to my studies since often I will be conveying information to the public in a concise, easy to understand manner, in a way that captures the audience’s attention.  We had to come up with first an 80-word paragraph and eventually whittle it down to something like 40 words.  It was a tough exercise, because you can’t really summarize your whole project in 40 words.  The point of the exercise, however, was to not speak on your whole research, but just the most captivating, important information.  Included were the ‘who, what, where, why.’  Overall I enjoyed this day filled with exercises and thought it was a very useful skill to have going forward with my Master’s.

Friday, all 30 of us presented our topics to the room.  I was volunteered to present, so I didn’t have the most preparation going into it.  However, I feel like I presented well.  We were each given three minutes-some a bit longer if they were further along on their research.  While I did not enjoy everyone’s presentation, I thought there were some great presentations that pushed me to think more deeply.  Some interesting topics included placing more trees in downtown Vancouver to reduce the ambient temperature through shading.  As well, my colleague presented on her bull trout internship through FLNRORD.  Nathan presented on forestry and Ben on his glacier research.

Overall, I thought most people presented well.  Some topics were not of my interest.  But what I did take home were tricks on how to present in a time-sensitive manner.  I then used these skills at a public fisheries meeting the next week!  I only had three minutes to talk since the meeting was going long and I had to present on my project.  I cut out all the uninteresting, non-relevant information and went with the most captivating, important details.  The next day I got a thank you and ‘great presentation’ from the leader of the Lake Association.