One of the big differences between being a PhD and an MSc student is that you are expected to contribute towards undergraduate teaching! Most of the time this comes in the form of demonstrating. This involves helping out in the practical classes and not necessarily teaching per se, but providing handy hints and generally acting as a problem-solver. The enjoyment one gets from this very much depends on the particular course that you are demonstrating on! It's always much easier to demonstrate a subject that you know something about, for example.
At the other end of the spectrum is helping to supervise 3rd year projects. I have found this much more enjoyable because you can follow the trajectory of the project from development to implementation and finally to completion. It is even more rewarding when the project is 'useful' in the sense that it adds something to your own research. I am lucky that my primary supervisors both try and pair undergraduates with PhD students who need something to be analysed or researched that is interesting but maybe not crucial to the central 'story' of their thesis.
So far I have had one student who was mainly supervised by Phil McGowan try to come up with a decision tree analysis framework that sought to determine which areas in SE Asia were priorities for re-surveying. She did admirably well but annoyingly for me, there were no central Himalayan priority sites! However, one major problem with her project that needs to be addressed is that it did not take into account habitat. This meant that some of the supposed 'top' sites were not so 'top' after all. Singapore is a good example: galliforms may have historically inhabited Singapore, but the only jungle that remains is definitely a concrete one! This would explain why no-one has surveyed the site for galliforms in recent years and why in actuality, it is not a priority site at all.
This exemplifies brilliantly how an undergraduate project can contribute to wider research - it is not necessarily about finding out a definitive 'answer' but laying the groundwork and exploring some of the issues that myself and Phil McGowan would like to further focus on. For example, I would very much like to repeat the decision tree analysis with habitat overlayed to see what effect this has on priority sites. Additionally, I would like to repeat it but only for the greater Himalayas. This all feeds into the final chapter I am hoping to write that will involve examining monitoring in the region.
I have recently had a new student come to work with me and this time the project will look at WWF ecoregions. The idea is that these are ready-made (albeit irregular) grid cells that will allow us to examine which broad-scale habitat features are important for different galliform species. At first though, I have suggested that we focus on how well the WPA records match what WWF says is true. WWF uses data from BirdLife and it would be interesting to see if any further information alters the shape of their range maps. Once we have examined all the pooled records (by time bin), we can start examining historical vs. recent records. I have been creating lots of different graphs demonstrating how the data has different spatio-temporal biases, so the student can perhaps focus on some basic weighting systems that account for these biases.
Anyway, it should prove interesting and hopefully will give us a broad answer as to how useful the WWF ecoregions are as broad conservation tools for Himalayan galliforms!
At the other end of the spectrum is helping to supervise 3rd year projects. I have found this much more enjoyable because you can follow the trajectory of the project from development to implementation and finally to completion. It is even more rewarding when the project is 'useful' in the sense that it adds something to your own research. I am lucky that my primary supervisors both try and pair undergraduates with PhD students who need something to be analysed or researched that is interesting but maybe not crucial to the central 'story' of their thesis.
So far I have had one student who was mainly supervised by Phil McGowan try to come up with a decision tree analysis framework that sought to determine which areas in SE Asia were priorities for re-surveying. She did admirably well but annoyingly for me, there were no central Himalayan priority sites! However, one major problem with her project that needs to be addressed is that it did not take into account habitat. This meant that some of the supposed 'top' sites were not so 'top' after all. Singapore is a good example: galliforms may have historically inhabited Singapore, but the only jungle that remains is definitely a concrete one! This would explain why no-one has surveyed the site for galliforms in recent years and why in actuality, it is not a priority site at all.
This exemplifies brilliantly how an undergraduate project can contribute to wider research - it is not necessarily about finding out a definitive 'answer' but laying the groundwork and exploring some of the issues that myself and Phil McGowan would like to further focus on. For example, I would very much like to repeat the decision tree analysis with habitat overlayed to see what effect this has on priority sites. Additionally, I would like to repeat it but only for the greater Himalayas. This all feeds into the final chapter I am hoping to write that will involve examining monitoring in the region.
I have recently had a new student come to work with me and this time the project will look at WWF ecoregions. The idea is that these are ready-made (albeit irregular) grid cells that will allow us to examine which broad-scale habitat features are important for different galliform species. At first though, I have suggested that we focus on how well the WPA records match what WWF says is true. WWF uses data from BirdLife and it would be interesting to see if any further information alters the shape of their range maps. Once we have examined all the pooled records (by time bin), we can start examining historical vs. recent records. I have been creating lots of different graphs demonstrating how the data has different spatio-temporal biases, so the student can perhaps focus on some basic weighting systems that account for these biases.
Anyway, it should prove interesting and hopefully will give us a broad answer as to how useful the WWF ecoregions are as broad conservation tools for Himalayan galliforms!
