OPPORTUNITIES FOR STUDENTS

Prizes | Registration | Travel Grants | Postgraduate Course

One of the features that made recent meetings of the ESA so successful has been the active participation of many student members. The ESA supports the involvement of student members by providing cut-price student registration fees, plus special travel grants and prizes. The ESA is also offering a special one-day postgraduate course in Current Ecology and Evolution on Sunday the 7th of December before the conference.

Student Prizes

The ESA offer prizes for the most outstanding student presentations at their annual conferences. This year there will be joint awards for the Best Talk and Best Poster presentations by ESA members who are students or recent graduates. There will also be a number of special awards, including the Blackwell EMR Prize for Best Student Oral or Poster paper on any aspect of ecological management or restoration of native species or communities; and the Australian Flora Foundation award for the best student presentation on the ecology of species of Australasian plants. To be eligible, presenters must be ESA members who are students or graduates who have completed their degree within the last 6 months; and the presentation must be about their student work.

For more information about Student Prizes at ESA Ecology 2003, click here.

Student Registration

Registration fees are subsidised for students who are members of ESA. Check out the websites for ESA membership details.

There are also concession rates for students or low income earners who are not members. To get these non-member concession rates, you’ll need to provide some documentary evidence of your status, like a letter from your Head of School or a photocopy of your student card (full-time students only), or pension card, or proof that your income is less than AU$21,000.

But if you are a student and an ecologist, and are thinking about coming to the conference, why not think about becoming a student-member first? Subscription rates are very low (in fact you’ll be better off financially if you join first then pay the student-member registration rate) and there are loads of other benefits too. Check out the ESA website to see what might be in it for you. Please do not send society subscriptions to the conference secretariat! (but do send us a photocopy of your membership form if you want us to know you have just joined.)

Student Travel Grants for Conference Attendance

Applications are open for Student Travel Grants for the ESA Ecology 2003 conference in Armidale. As for previous annual conferences, a limited number of grants will be awarded to students presenting a paper or poster. Each award is calculated on the distance traveled and the availability of other support, with the maximum award being $600. To be considered for approval, applicants must:
· be members of ESA
· be registered to attend the conference and present a poster or oral paper
· include an abstract of the proposed presentation
· indicate in their applications the projected travel budget, including the amount of any departmental or other support available, and
· provide contact details for their supervisor and departmental head

Applications, addressing each of the listed criteria, should be emailed as Word attachments to Kim Downs, kdowns@pobox.une.edu.au, by 5 September 2003.

Students whose abstracts are accepted will be considered for student travel grants. Applicants will be notified of their success in early October.

IMPORTANT: please read the criteria above carefully — applicants failing to address any of these criteria will not be considered.

For more information contact: grants@ecolsoc.org.au

Program Outline |Symposium Topics