APECS South Africa hosted their 1st workshop at the recent 5th SANAP/NRF PI Symposium. The symposium is organised every two years and open to any researcher and student involved in South African polar research. Since many of the APECS South Africa National Committee members were attending we decided to maximise on this opportunity to hold a workshop where we would spread the word about APECS & APECS South Africa, while also using the event to celebrate the 1st successful year as a NC.
The workshop was held on the evening of 14 August and was attended by approximately 40 people. Since APECSSA is a fairly new group within APECS, the majority of the workshop was used to introduce APECS and APECSSA to the participants.
We spoke about:
- Who APECS is;
- Who APECS South Africa is;
- Advantages of joining APECS and APECS South Africa (we also spoke to PIs about the mentor program and got some promises to sign up);
- Group activity/discussion on how to maximise attendance at conferences and networking from an established researcher's perspective, as well as an emerging researcher's perspective. Ian Meiklejohn from Rhodes University was kind enough to speak to the workshop participants from an established researcher's perspective. The APECS South Africa Chair (Christel Hansen) spoke from the view of an emerging researcher's perspective.
- The workshop concluded with more information on joining APECS and/or the APECS South Africa NC.
APECS South Africa was able to hold the workshop at the Symposium due to the assistance of the sponsors (the South African National Research Foundation) and organisers (the Cape Peninsula University of Technology and the South African National Space Agency). Material from the workshop is available on our website; the various presentations given are available (collated) here.