The Legacies Fund supported my attendance at the Royal Meteorological Society Student Conference 2012, which was held in Leeds between 9-15 July. I had been part of the organising committee of the conference, and it was very exciting to see everything we had planned come to fruition. The conference saw around 80 students from a variety of backgrounds, from meteorology through to oceanography through to Earth observation, come together to present their work in both oral and poster sessions. We also enjoyed hearing keynote speakers Carl Wunsch, John Pyle, Peter Lynch and Stephen Belcher, and were joined by several researchers in a session on careers, which gave students the opportunity to find out more about the lives of academics and what career paths they may be able to follow. Social events were central to the conference timetable and included an ice breaker event, a fiendish pub quiz and the conference dinner. It has to be said that attendance at the morning sessions following the dinner and subsequent outing to a nightclub was somewhat below average.
New to the conference this year was a set of sessions for the purpose of getting students to work in groups to come up with a proposal to spend £5000 that had been generously offered by one of the conference sponsors on an idea to promote science communication. This seemed like an audacious addition to the conference, and we did not know how well it would work. The results surpassed our expectations, however, with students coming up with a great range of well developed ideas by the end. A vote decided that the money would be spent on providing resource packs to schools to carry out meteorology projects, and everyone at the conference was given the opportunity to participate in making this a reality.
Overall the conference was a great success, and hopefully the organising committee for next year's conference can manage to do even better.
