Paleonet: another take on doing both SVP and GSA (with a plea to GSA members)

[James Farlow]

Folks:  Many of you probably have a situation similar to mine, in which your university or other place of employment provides limited funds for travel to professional meetings.  At my institution, we are given a set amount of travel funds for the entire year, which don't even cover the entire cost of SVP (so I eat that out of my own funds).  Another meeting in the same term would be financially difficult for me.


And there is anther issue for folks like me as well: I don't think it fair to my students to attend more than one professional meeting a semester.  Even SVP alone, if you sign up for a workshop and/or a field trip, once you include a travel day each way to/from the meeting venue, uses up a week or close to it.  That's a lot of class time missed.  I can't justify missing any more.


So what I do is attend SVP in the Fall, and regional GSA (north-central in my case) in the Spring.  NC GSA has a fair number of paleontologists, and I use this meeting to keep up a bit with what the invert folks are doing, and also attend talks on other aspects of geology as well.  I see a fair number of Paleo Society folks at NC GSA, which I enjoy.


Lately there have been more VP sessions at NC GSA, which is quite nice for me.  But I mainly go for the invertebrate talks (because I teach both IP and VP in my courses).


My lament about regional GSA, though, is that my perception is that a lot of the "big name" folks at midwestern schools don't attend NC GSA.  I'm not sure why.  But if GSA would like more participation from SVP members at GSA, it'd also be nice if GSA members were equally strongly encouraged to come to the  GSA regional meetings.