The new season of recruitment is already upon us! It seems strange, this new ILS program - we have just taken a new student in, many of us, and now it is time to start talking with applicants in Ecology and ILS. Today’s Graduate Student Symposium in the Odum School is a chance for the recruits to see all the amazing science that the grads are doing, if there is anything I’ve seen in 20 years of being in science its that good students do more to recruit good students than anything.

The lab is kicking, even without much money - as of this week, there are projects on bass, darters, other minnows, freshwater mussels, barnacles, copepods, and viruses all moving along at the same time. It means I am easily confused when I run into one of the students: what are you working on again???

But, really, this is what we do - it is easy to get an ego about the science, but the most important thing I do is train the next generation(s) of scientists, people who are fluent and able to understand, whether they are generating data or interpreting it for policy or for the public. A lot of fun people to work with, I’m lucky.