Recently on the outskirts of Melbourne, Poultry CRC supported postgraduate students gathered for our annual PoultryGrad workshop. The purposes of this event are professional development and social networking. With our students dispersed across the nation, the yearly face-to-face interactions serve to build and fortify relationships with their peers into the future.
The first day of this year’s event consisted of presentations, followed by a farm visit on the second day. This year featured workshops by:
- Tony Davis (Griffith Hack) – The basics of Intellectual Property (IP),
- Dr Pat Blackall (University of Queensland, Poultry CRC Program Manager) – Preparing a Research Proposal, and
- Dr Maria Gardiner (ThinkWell) – Defeating Self-Sabotage/Turbo-Charge your Writing.
A vast majority of our postgraduate students are in various stages of PhD’s (in addition to one Masters and two Honours students), so the relevance of these topics was extraordinarily high. The wealth of experience shown by these presenters, and their years of experience in their relevant fields, was boiled down succinctly into easily digestible expositions.
Tony Davis’ introduction to the world of IP was well received by students that perhaps have not had much thought about this aspect of research to date. “It was great speaking with interested students after the talk, and I hope that I was able to give them some useful pointers about the profession” Tony stated. “It is always helpful for us to know who is out there and interested in a career in IP”. One student in particular who is very interested in this field, has been invited by Tony to stay in touch should a trainee opportunity arise.
Pat Blackall, as always, presented with enthusiasm and deep knowledge of the research scene, as he displayed his personal insights and experience from 30+ years in the poultry arena. Pat’s key messages included the need to interact closely with industry across one’s career, ensuring you remain fresh in people’s minds. Through regular and consistent attendance to industry field days, peak body meetings etc. students were encouraged to be highly ‘visible’ to industry.
Maria Gardner’s workshop focussed predominately on writing. She discussed various techniques and methodology, backed by sound psychological science, to avoid procrastination and lack of productivity. Students were highly inspired by Maria’s insights, with feedback such as, “A lot of what was saying, in reality is probably common sense, but you need to be told these things, and the way she did this was really valuable” – Brendan Sharpe. Even our Program Managers, highly experienced professionals, were able to take something from Maria’s workshops.
The following morning students travelled to Kinross Farms at Kinglake to meet business owner Philip Szepe. Kinross is Victoria’s largest vertically integrated egg producer, producing over 3,600,000 table eggs per week across 11 (cage and/or free range) production sites. Phil and his staff were most generous with their time, allowing us to see all aspects of the Kinglake facility including pullet rearing, incubation, vaccine egg production, feed milling, and egg grading/packaging. Students were enthralled with the scale and quality of production, all done within a ‘best practice’ business mantra.
Poultry CRC Education Manager Liz Roan was praised highly by students (and indeed Program Managers in attendance) for the high calibre and quality of this year’s program. Feedback included, “PoultryGrad was great! Location, venue, talks, accommodation, food were all exceptional and I wouldn’t have changed a thing” (Ha Troung), “It was a great PoultryGrad and the farm tour was excellent” (Aaron Ray), “The workshop and the field visit were great. All three speakers for Tuesday were really good, and I sure got a lot out of the sessions. Phil was also very good. He is a business man and also one of the experts in the field” (Moreen Ali).
Perhaps 2014 PoultryGrad is best surmised by an email received from Ms Sonia Yun Liu, as follows:
“It was very nice to catch up with you at PoultryGrad last week. It is my last one as a student and the experience is very helpful and educational for me. I found the writing workshop is really helpful. It is not one of the boring workshops teaching people the ‘strategies’ of writing, but helped us to understand our motivations at a psychological level. This is really good because it can be applied in both writing and other ‘boring’ tasks.
I really enjoyed our farm tour on Wednesday; it was definitely worth getting up early. The whole production chain is very impressive. I always enjoy farm tours, especially this one, as it gives us an insight of how a layer farm operates from hatchery to end-product processing.
Thank you so much for organizing another wonderful PoultryGrad. Although I will not be a CRC student very soon, I really appreciate the support that CRC provided to me through years. I am looking forward to applying my knowledge in industry and my future research. Can’t wait to meet you next time!”
