The current COVID-19 situation has profoundly changed our daily lifes and has also affected our way to perform and share research. In today’s world a lot of efforts have been made to minimize the impact of working from home and exchange thoughts with colleagues, and also the usual annual General Assembly of the European Geosciences Union (EGU) has been moved online. Thus, the largest online event ever seen in the Earth, planetary and space sciences has been virtually hosted last week: Sharing Geoscience Online (#shareEGU20). This event has been particularly helpful for Early Career Scientists (ECS) of whom many are on temporary, short-term contracts in an already insecure and competitive working environment. Nevertheless ECS represent more than half of the EGU members and #shareEGU20 allowed most of them to present their work, to convene sessions, and to join networking events with established and senior researchers.
On Tuesday 5 May the Nonlinear Processes in Geosciences (NP) Division hosted the Networking with the ECS of the NP division. It was an online networking event with the aim to meet new people, to discuss with peers during a break-out session, to exchange information about for example career paths, challenges faced in our field or tips to work in times of restricted travel options. It was thought to bring together both ECS and senior scientists in order to be as inclusive and fruitful as possible. The meeting had a quite good attendance with an heterogeneous distribution of career paths as summarized in the image below.
The current status of people attending the Networking event of the NP Division.
Source: https://www.mentimeter.com/
The meeting has been very proficient, people coming from several countries animated a discussion on different topics: from the current format of #shareEGU20 to the improvements on NP Division activities. A lot of feedback and suggestions have been raised and can be summarized as below.
1. Stay in touch and organize bimonthly virtual meetings to share research and ideas. Did you miss it? Don’t worry you can sign in at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1G2gAnc-3xa98-hAKu_3ZtGXC_OCIhYO46wHCJ1C-SM8/edit.
2. Plan a NP meeting next year in the form of a training school, hopefully to host face-to-face or eventually virtually!
3. Had fun and shared opinions and feedback by means of a Mentimeter quiz! Here the results.
People thoughts on the Networking event.
People thoughts on the NP Division.
Source: https://www.mentimeter.com/
All materials are uploaded at https://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EGU2020/sessionAssets/38613/materials.pdf. Don’t forget to stay tuned and contact us for any issue you have at ecs-np@egu.eu.
