Like Jillian did a couple of months ago, I’d like to give you all a walk-through of a random day in my life as a Knauss Fellow in the National Marine Fisheries Service Office of Sustainable Fisheries. I decided to do this blog when I got into work this morning, so I’ll be writing about my day as it happens. I have two meetings and a webinar scheduled, which is a bit more than usual, and I have several long-term projects going.
8:30 am: Get to work, read emails, go over schedule for the day and prioritize.
9:00 am: Meet with co-workers to update each other on the status of three pieces of guidance working their way through the release process. These documents all have to do with National Standard 1 (in the Magnuson-Stevens Act) and are meant to help managers decide how best to calculate how much fish should be caught in a given year. This is more complicated than it sounds, and we’re coordinating three groups of high-level scientists and managers scattered all over the country.
10:00 am: Sit down to edit the white paper on scenario planning methods that I’ve been working on for a while. This document will eventually be published by NOAA so that managers who are interested in scenario planning can get a beginner-friendly rundown of the process.
10:45 am: Phone rings. It’s Ryan from one of the regional fisheries offices, calling to talk about some data he has on the outcomes of NMFS’s Bycatch Reduction Engineering Program grants. I’m trying to find out how often the research funded by these grants actually affects management, but I have to rely on people like Ryan, who are on the ground in the regions, to get the data for me.
11:00 am: Team meeting. We get updates on some external meetings that happened recently and talk about how to get or create good graphics for our presentations.
12:00 pm: Lunch at my desk while getting application materials together for a federal job.
12:30 pm: Go through more comments on the scenario planning white paper.
1:00 pm: Tune in to a webinar about navigating climate-driven ecological transformations.
2:00 pm: Livestream a House Water, Oceans, and Wildlife subcommittee hearing.
3:30 pm: Back to the scenario planning white paper.
4:45 pm: Write down what I did today and my priorities for tomorrow.
5:00 pm: Writing group with friends! (Don’t know who needs to hear this, but finish your dissertation before you start your Knauss.)
And that’s a day in my life! I hope this was helpful. Instead of posting pictures of me at my desk, I’ve included some fish I like. Three of them are tangentially related to my next post, and the other is a cowcod.
