Hi everyone my name is Ahmad. I am the Wildlife trade officer at LFP. In this week blog, I want to share about my first-ever experience in Europe. I attended a fully funded conference and internship programme at Cambridge University for 40 days.
Student Conference on Conservation Science (SCCS)
SCCS is firstly held by University of Cambridge on late 90s then by the time, followed by another counterpart country such as Australia, China, India , US and Hungary who participated in hosting this series of conservation conferences. This conference aimed entirely at students. SCCS helps young conservation scientists gain experience, learn new ideas and make contacts that will be valuable for their future careers. Each day the programme starts with a plenary lecture from a leading conservation scientist, and is followed by around 10 student talks. About 100 students also present their work at the three poster sessions. And this year, I was so honoured as I could sit in the same room with world’s only impactful conservationist ever, Sir David Attenborough, who gave adorable speech and two way discussion about conservation world and other plenary talk is about engaging policy-maker and scientist to work along with by former executive director UN Climate Change 2010-2016. As well as attending presentations, conference delegates can take part in workshops, which cover skills such as paper-writing, fund-raising, social science tools, and much more. Other events include evening sessions where delegates can meet conservation professionals from leading UK and international conservation bodies. Luckily, I got my seat on grant-writing workshop by National Geographic which was very insightful for early stage scientist like me to know how to write a good proposal.
Bursary and Internship
If you are from a developing country or eastern European country like me, you should have not worried because you can you apply for a bursary to help with the costs of getting to the conference or even an internship if you want to both attend the conference and work on a conservation-related project for one month at a UK institution. But it has very limited seat and extremely competitive, so I suggest you have to get prepare your application one month in-advance. The conference internship scheme enables students to extend their visit to the UK for up to four weeks after the conference to carry out mutually beneficial work with conservation organisations or academic institutions. The internship scheme aims to help develop
the careers of promising conservation scientists and to strengthen and catalyse north-south collaborations but SCCS wont help you to reach out UK institutions or NGO, instead you have to reach them at least two month before the scholarship application deadline because it would be a bit struggling if you don’t have any connection or counterpart there. For this regard, I choose Oxford Wildlife Trade Research Group in Oxford Brookes University with Profesor Vincent Nijman to host my internship during one month and SCCS will pay you everything up to 4 weeks including flight return ticket, accomodation, food and other costs related to your internship.
Final Information
So what are you waiting for, the next conference in the Cambridge series will be held from 24 – 26 March 2020, in the Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, UK.
Deadline for applications: Applications to SCCS 2020 will close on Sunday 20 October 2020 at 10pm UK time.
Apply now and good luck!
AHMAD ARDIANSYAH
