Report DZG Hamburg
From EESwiki
Winter 2008: Angelika Wirth visits DZG graduate meeting in Hamburg
In this report I want to describe my impression of the Graduate Meeting of Evolutionary Biology of the Deutsche Zoologische Gesellschaft in Hamburg which has been the first congress I participated at.
When Prof. Dr. Susanne Foitzik suggested me to apply for the EES grant for making a trip to a scientist congress I was really enthusiastic. As I didn't know anything about such meetings I looked for some „graduate-level“ meetings that sounded interesting. So I decided to visit the 13th Graduate Meeting of Evolutionary Biology of the Deutsche Zoologische Gesellschaft (DZG) in Hamburg in February 2008 to present the results of my diploma thesis. Although I was very nervous about giving a talk in English in front of people I didn't know I was really looking forward to this congress because further graduates of our research group decided to join me and to present their results either.
We got off the plane in Hamburg at Friday February 22nd 2008 at 11:00 o'clock. Since the registration of the participants should be at 17:00 o'clock we had half the day left to visit some sights of Hamburg. At the „Get together“ that followed the registration in the evening we got aquainted with some very nice students from Tübingen. The next two days were full of very intersting talks from invited speakers, diploma and PhD students. Because of the excellent organization of the congress there were enough short coffee and tea breaks between the talks so that we had no difficulties to follow the talks attentively. The coffee and tea table was located in the zoological museum next to the lecture hall. This nice little museum was a great place to get in conversation with the other participants. Also the poster sessions took place in this museum. The part of the congress I enjoyed most were those meetings of other students during the breaks. Amazingly, the most of the participants were extremely nervous before their talks so there was a high cohesion through sympathy and encouragements. This helped to reduce nervousness during our own talks and I think all of us did a quite good job. The programme for the saturday evening was also very well organized. We visited Hamburg „Dungeon“ an sat together in the Sausalitos cocktail bar. On Sunday we finished our trip to Hamburg with a conducted boat tour of the harbour and delicious fish sandwiches.
To sum up, I want to emphasize that this trip to Hamburg was a very great experience I don't want to miss. Hence, I really want to thank EES for giving me the opportunity to participate in this congress. There, we met so much interesting and kind people and some of them became our friends! So, we hope to see them again next year when the 14th Graduate Meeting of the DZG will take place in Munich.
