APECS Webinars

Are you 'stuck' in working on your thesis? Not totally motivated or frustrated and wondering why you are doing this? Just want to Quit? Or maybe you are getting towards the end of your studies and you are starting to think about your next step, looking at your resume and realizing that its not quite strong enough? In this webinar, Jennifer Provencher shares some of her success tips and ideas on how to get more involved in extra activities to help make sure your resume gets to the top of the pile.

Recorded on 12 October 2010

This video is part of an online lecture series coordinated by APECS, US NSF ARCSS Thermokarst Project, and the University of Canterbury to help early career polar researchers navigate their careers. For more information on the full series, visit apecs.is/ webinars.

Presenter:Jennifer Provencher - IPY Education and Outreach Assessment Project Coordinator, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

After Jennifer completed her BSc in marine biology at the University of British Columbia, she went on to do a BEd with a focus in junior sciences and biology. Ms. Provencher then joined the public education team at the Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre where she led hands-on field and classroom excursions, developed video-conferencing programs and created placed-based lesson plans. She also led a number of curriculum projects that were focused on creating teaching units that utilized current science to teach provincial and national curriculum. Alongside her public education duties she also worked as an on-call teacher for the local school district.

During the recent IPY Jennifer had the privilege of working on two very different, but complimentary projects. On the science side her MSc research at the University of Victoria focused on using two Arctic seabird species as indicators of change in marine ecosystems, specifically how marine plastic debris has increased, and how prey species utilized by seabirds in the eastern Canadian Arctic is changing as summer sea ice decreases. This research was an extension of an Environment Canada long term seabird monitoring program with historical data collected in the 1970s and 80s compared with recent collections in 2007/08/09 in the low, mid and high Arctic zones.

On the education side of IPY 2008-2009 she has been involved in the development of the Sea Ice Education package, a teacher’s guide for middle and high school aged students examining sea ice and its importance to northern communities and ecosystems. One of the goals of Sea Ice Education package is to take data and science that has been produced during the recent IPY and create active science lessons plans based on current and relevant science for northern communities. Her research group’s seabird work in the eastern Canadian Arctic forms the basis of the sea ice and marine bird section, with data collected during the recent IPY the focus of several activities investigating sea ice and its importance to marine birds.