Hello from Austin!
We are here in the Lone Star State with a growing micro-city of meteorologist, earth scientists, and social scientists…9 of us from the chapter. The last two days consisted of student oriented conferences, talks, and networking events. The general theme that I have been seeing is the emphasis on communications. As we saw at the National Weather Association conference a few months ago, communication is becoming evermore important as your base science itself. This is because of the gulf between how scientists know science and how the average joe understands the science. Recommendations for students and professionals alike include being familiar with speaking in front of large crowds, communicating complex ideas through broken up pieces of information fed temporally over a larger expanse of time, and taking general coursework in communications. Thus far in the conference I have only heard one truly bad speech, which was characterized by a heavy dose of of the ‘umms’ and a poorly thought out train of thought. Overall communication though the conferences over the years has improved, but not yet to a point that we could go out on to the streets and talk about our ideas with complete success.
I don’t if I am getting better well known at conferences or if more people have shown up this year, but I have been in contact with a superb number of NFLAMS/NWA alum this year in just the last 24 hours or so. Tomorrow we will have pictures up from alumni events and events throughout the weekend. You can follow our members on twitter as well using handles @dalybrandon, @mgatdt, @laurenvisin, @Bradywx62, and myself, @JonathanBelles.
My hope is to have numerous of our attending members post later this week with varying perspectives. If you all have questions for anyone in Meteorology comment or send me a message on twitter and I will try to get those questions answered.
Until next time,
Jonathan Belles, Past=President
