President’s Message
What’s up with the Wildlife Society?
Website, Webinars and Awards
This President’s message will take you on a quick tour of ndctws.org, our new website. Yes, we have a wonderful new website with many additional functions. One of the best parts is that board member Hanna Karevold has taken on the work of designing and developing the website and this will save the chapter money every year. You can become a member, sign up for the annual meeting, nominate someone for an award and become a working group member all on one website. I think the website is very intuitive, but to help everyone out, we will be having an information session on using the website on December 3rd from 12-1 PM, the video and call in information is at the bottom of this message. We will be primarily using the website, Facebook and Twitter to get information out, as we were not able to recruit a newsletter editor.
The top banner of the website invites you to check out the Fall Lunch Hour Lecture Series “Careers in Wildlife”. One of the goals of the executive board is to increase our communications with and add value for our student members. The lecture series has been successful with high student participation and has been a great way to try to fill the void of not having the in person student luncheon during the pandemic. The series is aimed at students and young professionals, but everyone is welcome to join. I have enjoyed learning more about the types of careers and the paths that our peers took to get to their current positions. The next session of this series is on December 16th from 12-1 PM and will focus on private industry wildlife careers with guests Greg Petrick from BNI Coal and Alex Brazeal from WEST, Inc., click Here to join. A special thank you to board member Cayla Bendel for leading this effort.
Our website home page offers a wealth of information about the chapter, but I would like to focus on the awards area, located under the annual meeting tab. Award nominations will now be submitted online for Student Scholarship Awards, Charles V. Pulver Case of the Year, North Dakota Wildlife Habitat Award and the North Dakota Award. All of these awards now have standardized forms that are directly submitted on the new website. We are hoping this helps clarify what information is needed and gives the board an “apples to apples” comparison when scoring candidates. In addition, we are hopeful that this format will yield more award nominations from our membership. Student Awards are widely supported by chapter members and this year we have expanded them to include monetary support for two graduate students and two additional undergraduate students. In addition, we have reclassified “Student Awards” as “Student Scholarships” and are giving students the ability to nominate themselves or their peers rather than the chapter seeking nominations from academic faculty. All award and scholarship nomination forms are currently open so nominate yourself or someone deserving today!
-Jessica Johnson
President, NDCTWS
